Race, Grievance Systems, and Prisoners’ Perceptions of Justice in Three California Prisons

Abstract

A large body of social science consistently documents race differences in the U.S. criminal justice system and in related perceptions of justice. It is now beyond dispute that the criminal justice system is racialized in a plethora of ways that have consequences for how people perceive justice. Another vast body of literature documents the importance of perceptions of procedural justice in people’s satisfaction with dispute management and outcomes. Informed by these two well-established literatures, we draw on original quantitative and qualitative data, including a random sample of interviews with 120 men in three California prisons, to present an empirical analysis of prisoners’ experiences with the prisoner grievance system, their level of satisfaction with the process and outcomes of that system, and their perceptions of fairness. We find an absence of race effects regarding how fairly they say they have been treated in the past by the criminal justice system and in how they assess justice in the prisoner grievance system in particular. Specifically, we find that: 1) male prisoners’ perceptions of whether the overall criminal justice system has been fair to them in the past does not vary by race in statistically significant ways; and 2) the dominance of substantive grievance outcomes over procedural elements in prisoners’ satisfaction holds regardless of racial self-identification. We explain these findings by arguing that prison may perversely level the attitudinal gap among those who are subject to this profound experience of state power.

“It Depends on the Outcome”: Prisoners, Grievances, and Perceptions of Justice

“…The vast majority are denied, with only 0.2 percent of the 15,836 grievances that made it to the third level in 2005-2006 fully granted. While there are no official statistics on fully granted grievances at lower levels of review, we estimate that 2.3 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively, were granted at the first and second levels (for further discussion of the frequency and content of complaints as well as estimates of outcomes, see Calavita and Jenness 2015).…”

“…2 We were also allowed inside the administrative archives where tens of thousands of prisoner grievances and hundreds of prison records are kept, providing us with a rich source of archival data. These data reveal the voices of prisoners and staff, the problematic conditions of prison life, and the administrative work done by the prison officials who respond to prisoner grievances-topics covered in our larger project on the prisoner grievance system in California (Calavita and Jenness 2015). In this article, we focus on the prisoner interviews.…”

“…Despite this low level of grants and extensive critiques of the PLRA and the internal remedy system it mandated, the prison officials interviewed in this study uniformly lauded the system as fair to prisoners, praised the social control aspects of the grievance system, and embraced the presumed role the grievance system plays in protecting the CDCR against lawsuits (Calavita and Jenness 2015). Hand-in-hand with an often expressed disdain for prisoners, they told us, as one grievance examiner put it, "Inmates can, do, and should have rights."…”

“…Such investigation may consist of telephone calls to officials at the prison where the complaint originated or document retrieval, but rarely involves a trip to the prison. The Chief of Inmate Appeals informs the appellant in writing of the final decision, making it clear that the appellant has exhausted all internal remedies (for more details on the inmate appeal process, see Calavita and Jenness 2015).…”

“…In previous work (Calavita and Jenness 2015), we describe the grievance process in detail and document the "pyramid of disputes" as prisoners name, blame, and make claims about problems in prison, as well as exploring both prisoners' and staff 's framing of grievances (see also Jenness and Calavita 2017). However, that work does not address the critical issue of how these prisoners perceive fairness and justice in the disputing process, specifically how they weigh procedural and substantive justice.…”