Grievous or Gratifying? Inmate Grievance Processes and Justice in a California Women's Prison

Mass incarceration in the United States has created a multitude of issues attracting the attention of criminal justice scholars and practitioners. This dissertation concerns the intersection of two issues: the internal grievance processes inmates must use to contest their conditions of confinement and the growing population of women prisoners. It does so within the context of California, where prison overcrowding crises have resulted in Supreme Court rulings to reduce populations. The project assesses imprisoned women's perceptions of the justice meted out to them by the criminal justice system, particularly involving their interaction, or lack thereof, with internal prison grievance procedures. The dissertation complicates procedural and distributive justice conceptions explored by Tom Tyler and colleagues and adds retributive justice conceptions to the discussion.;I analyzed interview and archival data to address questions about the types of issues important to imprisoned women and how race and gender might impact their perceptions of justice. I conducted and analyzed interviews with forty randomly selected women incarcerated in one prison in California and analyzed a random sample of 100 inmate grievance forms filed by women incarcerated in California in fiscal year 2005-2006. I found that many imprisoned women eschewed the use of grievance procedures to address problems due to the widespread perception of retaliation, particularly regarding complaints against staff. Nevertheless, a relatively high percentage of respondents had filed a grievance, including complaints against staff. Respondents' discourses often focused on procedural injustice in the form of poor treatment on the bases of race and gender stereotypes. Yet many women rejected characterizing their experiences as discrimination and more often characterized them as "disrespect." Interview respondents and grievance authors used procedural, distributive and retributive justice conceptions to describe unjust processes and appropriate remedies. Respondents discussed procedural injustices in court and sentencing processes as producing distributive and retributive injustices, and sometimes procedural injustice in the form of poor treatment was itself perceived as a retributive outcome. These justice concept intersections, reasons imprisoned women might resist describing their experiences in legal terms like race and gender discrimination, and the socio-legal and theoretical implications of these findings, will be discussed.