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University of California Press

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Tables
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Rights, Captivity, and Disputing behind Bars
2. “Needles,” “Haystacks,” and “Dead Watchdogs”: The Prison Litigation Reform Act and the Inmate Grievance System in California
3. Naming, Blaming, and Claiming in an Uncommon Place of Law
4. Prisoners’ Counternarratives: “This Is a Prison and It’s Not Disneyland”
5. “Narcissists,” “Liars,” Process, and Paper: The Dilemmas and Solutions of Grievance Handlers
6. Administrative Consistency, Downstream Consequences, and “Knuckleheads”
7. Grievance Narratives as Frames of Meaning, Profiles of Power
8. Conclusion

Appendix A: Procedures for Interviews with Prisoners
Appendix B: Procedures for Interviews with CDCR Personnel
Appendix C: Coding the Sample of Grievances
Cases
Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"The authors bring wide-ranging scholarship to bear on the contradictions between the logic of rights and of carceral control. . . . There are no simple truths in this exceptional work of scholarship, which is important for criminology, sociology, law, and political science."
CHOICE
"Appealing to Justice provides a powerful and disturbing window into the deprivations of contemporary punishment and a brilliant theoretical argument about the role of law inside of prisons."
Punishment & Society
"After reading this book, I gained a better understanding of what takes place when a prisoner files a grievance, and the struggle it is to get their voice heard in prison... I highly recommend this book to any social work students or anyone interested in becoming a social worker."
The New Social Worker
"A valuable contribution to our knowledge of the prisoner society, conditions of confinement and operational realities in the California prison system... [a] highly original book."
British Journal of Criminology
"Drawing on evidence from several hundred case records and interviews with people who are incarcerated and corrections employees, Calavita and Jenness generate a theoretically rich and broadly relevant account... illuminating."
Contemporary Sociology
"An important contribution... [the authors] upend conventional wisdom on both prisons and disputing. The work should be engaged by a broad range of scholars and will hopefully serve as a foundational comparative work for future researchers."
American Journal of Sociology
"This book continues an important yet infrequent discussion about the nuances of the correctional grievance system. The excellent research relationship the authors had with the CDCR allowed findings drawn from multiple sources."
Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology
"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

Awards

  • Albert L. Reiss Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award Honorable Mention 2019 2019, American Sociological Association, Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance
  • Law and Society Association Legacy Award, Law and Society Association
  • 2016 Law and Society Association Law & Society Division Sutherland Book Award 2016, Law and Society Association
  • 2016 Society for the Study of Social Problems Theory Division Outstanding Book Award 2016, Society for the Study of Social Problems