Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic - Softcover

Calavita, Kitty; Jenness, Valerie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520284186 ISBN 13: 9780520284180

Verlag: University of California Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners' written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzantine grievance process, which begins with prisoners filing claims and ends after four levels of review, with corrections officials usually denying requests for remedies. Appealing to Justice is both an unprecedented study of disputing in an extremely asymmetrical setting and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. Quoting extensively from their interviews with prisoners and officials, the authors give voice to those who are almost never heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms within the sociological literature--for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable and/or stigmatized populations to name injuries and file claims, and about the relentlessly adversarial subjectivities of prisoners and correctional officials--and they do so with striking poignancy. Ultimately, Appealing to Justice reveals a system fraught with impediments and dilemmas, which delivers neither justice, nor efficiency, nor constitutional conditions of confinement.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kitty Calavita is Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society and of Sociology at UC Irvine. Her books include Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law; Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe; Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis; and Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS.

Valerie Jenness is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and of Sociology at UC Irvine, where she is also Dean of the School of Social Ecology. Her books include Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement Practice; Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence; Making It Work: The Prostitutes' Rights Movement in Perspective; and Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy.

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"A beautifully written, compelling, and heartbreaking account of the promise and failure of the rule of law; there is no one better able to tell the story of these prisoners."—Susan S. Silbey, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Reveals both the deep tensions between legal rights and carceral control and the profound asymmetry of dispute processing in this distinctive total institution."—Robert M. Emerson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Dispels myths about inmate complaints while capturing surprisingly candid staff comments regarding their mission, inmate rights, and the incarcerated. A must-read."—Jeanne Woodford, Former Undersecretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

“At once profoundly depressing and uplifting. Do not look for simple solutions in this book; it is filled with complicated truths."—Malcolm Feeley, Claire Sanders Clements Dean's Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"Top-rate interdisciplinary scholarship, thoughtful analysis, and smart, sensitive field study.”—Doran Larson, Director of the American Prison Writing Archive and the Program in Jurisprudence, Law, and Justice Studies, Hamilton College

"Through engaging prose and evocative evidence, Calavita and Jenness demonstrate how the legal consciousness of prisoners and prison officials reveals and reinforces the incoherence of imprisonment."—Rosemary Gartner, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto

"This compelling book provides both an illuminating account of life inside twenty-first century American prisons and a pathbreaking analysis of disputing processes in an uncommon place of law. The authors skillfully weave together complex information from interviews and documentary sources to demonstrate powerfully that people in a repressive environment, utilizing a hollow and unresponsive formal process, can nevertheless courageously maintain an insistent rights consciousness."—George Lovell, Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies, Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Washington

Aus dem Klappentext

"A beautifully written, compelling, and heartbreaking account of the promise and failure of the rule of law; there is no one better able to tell the story of these prisoners." Susan S. Silbey, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Reveals both the deep tensions between legal rights and carceral control and the profound asymmetry of dispute processing in this distinctive total institution." Robert M. Emerson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Dispels myths about inmate complaints while capturing surprisingly candid staff comments regarding their mission, inmate rights, and the incarcerated. A must-read." Jeanne Woodford, Former Undersecretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

At once profoundly depressing and uplifting. Do not look for simple solutions in this book; it is filled with complicated truths." Malcolm Feeley, Claire Sanders Clements Dean's Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"Top-rate interdisciplinary scholarship, thoughtful analysis, and smart, sensitive field study. Doran Larson, Director of the American Prison Writing Archive and the Program in Jurisprudence, Law, and Justice Studies, Hamilton College

"Through engaging prose and evocative evidence, Calavita and Jenness demonstrate how the legal consciousness of prisoners and prison officials reveals and reinforces the incoherence of imprisonment." Rosemary Gartner, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto

"This compelling book provides both an illuminating account of life inside twenty-first century American prisons and a pathbreaking analysis of disputing processes in an uncommon place of law. The authors skillfully weave together complex information from interviews and documentary sources to demonstrate powerfully that people in a repressive environment, utilizing a hollow and unresponsive formal process, can nevertheless courageously maintain an insistent rights consciousness." George Lovell, Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies, Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Washington

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Appealing to Justice

Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic

By Kitty Calavita, Valerie Jenness

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28418-0

Contents

List of Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
1. Introduction: Rights, Captivity, and Disputing behind Bars, 1, 
2. "Needles," "Haystacks," and "Dead Watchdogs": The Prison Litigation Reform Act and the Inmate Grievance System in California, 24, 
3. Naming, Blaming, and Claiming in an Uncommon Place of Law, 49, 
4. Prisoners' Counternarratives: "This Is a Prison and It's Not Disneyland", 80, 
5. "Narcissists," "Liars," Process, and Paper: The Dilemmas and Solutions of Grievance Handlers, 97, 
6. Administrative Consistency, Downstream Consequences, and "Knuckleheads", 130, 
7. Grievance Narratives as Frames of Meaning, Profiles of Power, 150, 
8. Conclusion, 182, 
Appendix A: Procedures for Interviews with Prisoners, 195, 
Appendix B: Procedures for Interviews with CDCR Personnel, 198, 
Appendix C: Coding the Sample of Grievances, 200, 
Cases, 203, 
Notes, 205, 
References, 223, 
Index, 237, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Rights, Captivity, and Disputing behind Bars

In 2006, James Williams lodged a grievance with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), citing temperatures of 114 degrees in the overcrowded concrete cells of the desert prison where he was held. It was "cruel and unusual punishment," he wrote, to house people in these overheated cubicles where the only ventilation came from scorching metal vents on the roof. He ended by noting that even the prison dog kennels were air-conditioned. The CDCR denied his appeal. Tens of thousands of prisoners like Williams file grievances in California's thirty-three prisons every year, with the vast majority denied by prison authorities.

The grievance system that Williams used is the legally sanctioned internal mechanism for prisoners to contest the conditions of their confinement, and federal law requires exhaustion of this administrative process before prisoners may gain access to court. In California, the process includes multiple levels of review, all conducted exclusively by the CDCR. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Williams's grievance was denied. After all, the CDCR acts as both defendant and judge in these complaints. More surprising is the fact that despite the odds against success, prisoners' cynicism about the process, and their perception that there are risks to filing, every year thousands of prisoners like Williams do so.

This book began with the hope that the inmate grievance process might provide a window through which to glimpse daily prison life. Our unprecedented access to prisoners and CDCR officials to interview, and photocopies of hundreds of prisoner grievances, yielded an abundance of descriptive riches. Our interviews and the sample of grievances emerging from this most closed of institutions describe overheated cells but also a range of claims involving food and "chow hall" practices, medical care, staff conduct, physical safety, cell assignments, disciplinary action, visitation procedures, and the chaos of transfers and missing property. Collectively, these data provide a sense of the ordinary punctuated by the exceptional that makes up life inside prison. At a time when the U.S. prison population has increased many times over and far outstrips that of any other nation, empirical research about what happens behind prison walls has dwindled in the United States. Our focus on the prisoner grievance process and what it reveals about prison life more generally is in part driven by the simple need for discovery and description.

These prisoner grievances also shed light on the nature of disputing in an extremely hierarchical setting. They are essentially disputes, and the process they trigger is an exercise in dispute resolution, albeit one that is heavily asymmetrical in design and outcome. For California inmates, prison is a restrictive, overcrowded environment, replete with conditions that are grievable, as documented in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Plata, 563 U.S. __ (2011). However, as we know from an extensive scholarship on disputing, the presence of grievable conditions—even serious or life-threatening ones—is not in itself sufficient for launching a dispute. Instead, the ability and willingness to name a problem, blame someone for it, and lodge a claim is socially and culturally patterned, with vulnerable or self-blaming populations facing daunting barriers. Williams's grievance and those of so many other prisoners—one of the most stigmatized and vulnerable populations imaginable—are all the more surprising in the context of this previous scholarship on the social and cultural impediments to "naming, blaming, and claiming" (Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1980–81).

This enigma is one of the analytical threads of our story, and making sense of it was initially the theoretical driving force of our research. But as we attempted to solve this mystery, our empirical data revealed a cascade of other puzzles. Among the most perplexing were that despite prisoners' cynicism about the appeals process and criminal justice in general, they expressed a profound faith in law and evidence; that CDCR staff praised the grievance process as an important right accorded prisoners yet referred to those who exercised that right as "narcissists" and "whiners"; and that despite a marked degree of consistency in CDCR appeals responses, with most appeals denied at all levels of review, when discussing the process of achieving this consistency, these CDCR staff reported a surprising level of conflict in the ranks.

These disparate findings, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with blurry images and jagged edges, only make sense when you look carefully at the bigger picture of which they are part. In broad outline, it is a picture of a late-modern society that has expanded civil and legal rights, yet deprives people of their liberty on an unprecedented scale. This "civil rights society" (Bumiller 1988) embraces the rhetoric of rights, but at the same time has taken a pronounced punitive turn that leaves approximately one in a hundred people in the United States behind bars. The logic of rights and the punitive logic of incarceration are now among the defining ideologies of American society, permeating institutions both large and small despite what appears to be their glaring incongruence.

It is often noted that the increase in incarceration in the United States came on the heels of the civil rights movement and its accompanying advances in legal rights and rights consciousness (Beckett 1997; Hagan 2010; Western 2006). Some scholars have even suggested a causal relationship, with mass incarceration serving to restore social control over racial minorities just as they had secured a measure of equal rights (Loury 2007; Murakawa 2006; Weaver 2007; Western 2006). Whatever the reasons for this sequence of events, they have set in motion a seismic tension that reverberates throughout society and is found in its most primal form in the practices that distinguish the contemporary prison.

Indeed, prisons in the United States—overcrowded with prisoners who are savvy about their legal rights, often overseen by activist courts, and guided by thick volumes of regulations—sit at the very fault line of this contradiction. As we argue in the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520284186
• ISBN 13: 9780520284180
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland