Inmate Responses to Experiences With Court System Procedural and Distributive Justice

Abstract

According to criminal justice theories, perceptions of procedural and distributive justice drive opinions on fairness, subsequently affecting behavior. We contend that such perceptions also affect the emotional states of incarcerated individuals, identifying court experiences as the focus of our study. Through fieldwork at a male maximum-security prison, we find that inmates expressed negative emotional responses associated with three factors: trial, public defenders, and appeals. Participants described perceived fairness through personal comparisons to alternative procedures and outcomes often connected to socioeconomic resources and related perceptions to emotions such as frustration, regret, resentment, and hopelessness. We situate our findings within theories of fairness and inmate adjustment research.

Keywords

distributive justice procedural justice inmate adjustment trial public defenders

Introduction

A long line of criminal justice research has examined the effect of procedural and distributive justice on perceptions of fairness. Perceptions of fairness affect individuals’ views on the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, ultimately influencing compliance (Tyler, 1990/2006). At the same time, perceptions of injustice also result in a host of negative emotions (Markovsky, 1988; Mikula, Scherer, & Athenstaedt, 1998), such that procedural and distributive justice deserve further scrutiny beyond their effect on compliance or the general public. This literature has often overlooked those whose experience with the criminal justice system extends to incarceration. Inmates represent an important group for understanding the negative emotions that accompany perceived procedural and distributive justice, as such experience results in the ultimate loss of liberty through imprisonment. Researchers have examined extensively the factors that lead to differences in adjustment to the carceral experience. Here, we contend that the negative emotions associated with perceptions of unfairness resulting from procedural and distributive justice within the court system merit consideration alongside other known factors affecting inmate adjustment to incarceration.

We organize the article as follows. First, we review the literature on perceptions of fairness and its consequences, focusing on the negative emotional responses associated with perceived inequality in procedural and distributive justice. We introduce three aspects of the court system for which inmates might perceive unfairness: trials and plea-bargaining, public defenders, and the appeals process. Next, we describe our ethnographic fieldwork that utilized a combined inductive and deductive strategy over the course of two summers. This strategy answers calls to utilize prison ethnographies, given their decline since the beginning of the era of mass incarceration, to understand the incarceration experience (Wacquant, 2002). We then describe the findings, following Bosworth, Campbell, Demby, Ferranti, and Santos’s (2005) recommendation that the emotions of inmates take a central role in data collection in prison research. The results document the negative emotions surrounding perceptions of fairness within court system experiences. As a final step, following grounded theory development, we introduce a conceptual model of inmate adjustment and conclude with the consequences for prisons, theories of justice, and future research. Thus, we utilize qualitative research to develop a set of empirically testable hypotheses for a heretofore understudied factor in the literature.

Perceptions of Fairness and its Consequences

According to criminal justice research, there are two sources of perceptions of fairness: procedural and distributive justice. From the perspective of procedural justice, individuals define fair procedures based upon an opportunity to have a voice in the decision-making process, the neutrality of the decision-maker, being treated with respect, and the trustworthiness of authority figures (Tyler, 1990/2006). While recognizing the importance of policing related to perceptions of procedural justice (Tyler, 1990/2006; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003), including in the case of inmates (Baker et al., 2014), we concentrate here on fairness perceptions of court system procedures and outcomes. For example, given its constitutional guarantee and adversarial nature, individuals might consider a trial more “fair” than plea-bargaining because of the opportunity to be heard. Yet, researchers have argued that defendants may perceive plea-bargaining as more procedurally fair, as there is increased opportunity to personally affect the decision relative to trial (Casper, Tyler, & Fisher, 1988; O’Hear, 2008). Similarly, inmates may view public defenders who work for the state as less fair relative to private attorneys due to potential neutrality issues, perhaps viewing them as “double agents” (Uphoff, 1992). With family support an important component of emotional health and recovery during and after appeals processes (Jenkins, 2014), indigent inmates with few resources and connections to the outside may feel as though they have no voice in these processes. Each of these examples highlights a variety of court system components where perceptions of procedural justice originate.

Perceptions of distributive justice, or those based on the fairness of outcomes, are also essential in how defendants perceive the court system. For example, those who identify with the values of a particular subgroup, rather than those of legal authorities, are more likely to be influenced by perceptions of the fairness of outcomes as opposed to fair treatment (Tyler, 2000). Serious criminal offenders may look to outcomes to judge fairness or assess them in combination with procedural justice (Casper et al., 1988). In addition, unfair procedures provide an opportunity to attribute an unfavorable outcome to external causes, while fair procedures do not. Thus, people may react more negatively to fair procedures after an unfavorable outcome (van den Bos, Bruins, Wilke, & Dronkert, 1999). For example, even if individuals view the trial procedure as fair, punishments from trial are typically more severe than those from plea-bargaining. Thus, an individual who goes to trial has a point of comparison to an alternative, preferable outcome for the same committed act, questioning fairness on grounds of distributive justice.

Although extensive, research on fairness has focused primarily on either attitudes of the general population or those with contact with police and the courts, often overlooking those funneled through the third step of the criminal justice system, a sentence to incarceration. The limited body of research on how inmates experience procedural justice has most often addressed attitudes of fairness or legitimacy of the institutions of police and courts (Baker et al., 2014) or the correctional setting (Reisig & Mesko, 2009). Rather than concentrate on these issues, we take a different approach, using qualitative data to examine inmate negative emotions as an outcome emerging from perceptions of court system fairness. Prior attitudes developed before experience with the legal system and legal authorities shape interpretations of fairness, and further experiences can alter previously held beliefs about the system (Tyler, 1987). We contend that the consequences of both procedural and distributive justice continue to affect the emotional state of incarcerated individuals and that much of the experience is unique given their imprisoned status.

The three factors mentioned above (i.e., trial, public defenders, appeals) are each important given their salience for incarcerated populations. Of all felonies, estimates show that a state or county public defender program represented about 55% of defendants (Farole & Langton, 2010; Langton & Farole, 2010; Perry & Banks, 2011). While plea-bargaining is the norm at about 94% of felony convictions, going to trial is more common among the subset of criminal defendants who are imprisoned at about 11% (Rosenmerkel, Durose, & Farole, 2009). No studies have examined the proportion of prisoners’ seeking appeals and sentence modifications, and even less is known about such prisoners’ indigent status. In one of the only studies conducted during recent decades as the U.S. incarceration rate increased, 6% to 12% of Rhode Island prisoners filed for sentence modifications (Braslow & Cheit, 2011). Thus, in an era of mass incarceration, a subset of prisoners may judge the fairness of these various factors on grounds of procedural and distributive justice.

Both laboratory experiments (Markovsky, 1988) and large-scale studies (Mikula et al., 1998) reveal the strong effects of injustice on a range of negative emotions. Perceived injustices can occur by way of comparison to an alternative situation, which can lead to higher levels of stress (Jasso, 1980, 1993). For example, an inmate who went to trial may compare his situation to an alternative outcome from a plea-bargain. Similarly, an inmate who has a public defender may assume she would have fared better with a private attorney, despite a relatively established literature showing few differences in outcomes among those represented by public defenders and private attorneys (Hartley, Miller, & Spohn, 2010). Using a survey with female inmates, Tatar, Kassa, and Cauffman (2012) found that perceptions of procedural injustice were associated with higher depressive symptoms. Providing nuance to such survey results, we use the words of our respondents to highlight the components of the court system that, for them, are the locus of perceived injustice and a source of negative emotions.

Given the potential negative emotional responses emanating from experiences with procedural and distributive justice, we believe that such factors can be situated within the broader literature on inmate perceptions of legitimacy and adjustment to prison. Adjustment is multifaceted and can be defined along numerous dimensions (Dhami, Ayton, & Loewenstein, 2007; Van Tongeren & Klebe, 2010). Here, we are most interested in psychological adjustment, as reflected in responses from incarcerated persons that are indicative of emotions such as frustration, regret, resentfulness, and hopelessness. We anticipate that perceptions of justice can fit into a model of inmate adjustment in many ways, either directly affecting adjustment or interacting with other sources of maladjustment. Early on, Sykes (1958) described several psychological “pains of imprisonment” (Johnson & Toch, 1982). Yet, the nature of imprisonment has changed drastically since that period, with a shifting focus from corrections to population management (Feeley & Simon, 1992) resulting from mass incarceration (Fleury-Steiner & Longazel, 2013).

Several excellent reviews have outlined the factors affecting prisoner adjustment (Adams, 1992; Fleury-Steiner & Longazel, 2013; Haney, 2006; Kruttschnitt & Gartner, 2003; Liebling, 1992; Toch, Adams, & Grant, 1989), such that we do not review them here. Summarizing this literature, researchers generally put forth three explanatory factors: exogenous and background factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, demographics, and sentence characteristics), psychological factors (e.g., abuse history, substance use, coping ability), and institutional factors (e.g., overcrowding, service availability). Furthermore, these factors influence the relationship between inmate’s perceptions of legitimacy and their adjustment in prisons. Inmates report that incarceration is less stress-inducing in prisons where relationships among prisoners and staff are healthy, and authority is competent, certain of their roles, and protective of inmates (Crewe, 2014; Liebling, 2011; Liebling & Arnold, 2012; Kruttschnitt & Vuolo, 2007). This institutional oversight affects adjustment and perceptions of legitimacy among prisoners. In particular, access to normative spaces where staff treat inmates as students and workers, while allowing prisoners to be emotionally vulnerable, creates a legitimate environment conducive to feelings of fairness among inmates (Crewe, Liebling, & Hulley, 2014; Crewe, Warr, Bennett, & Smith, 2014). In addition, not all inmates will cope with the same sentence length in the same way (Jewkes, 2002), which has implications for both procedural justice perceptions and mental distress (Tatar et al., 2012).

We argue that perceptions of fairness related to procedural and distributive justice, such as those associated with the court system, can be considered alongside these factors in theories of prisoner psychological adjustment to incarceration. For example, when offenders feel the court system has treated them fairly, they better adjust psychologically to the prison environment (Beijersbergen, Dirkzwager, Eichelsheim, van der Laan, & Nieuwbeerta, 2014, Beijersbergen, Dirkzwager, Molleman, van der Laan, & Nieuwbeerta, 2015). To reach this conclusion, we use a version of grounded theory that combines inductive and deductive approaches, to which we now turn.

Method

For this study, the first author spent 150 hours over two summers conducting fieldwork at a state-operated maximum-security prison for men in a northeastern U.S. state, a facility containing about 1,400 inmates and 500 staff. In a Department of Corrections visit to our university campus, we approached human resources representatives about the possibility of doing research inside a prison. After a formal application process, the Department of Corrections approved the first author’s position as a “research internship” for the purpose of collecting data for a research project on the prison experience. Once at the prison, the warden and other relevant officials gave him broad access to the prison population. Data were collected on two shifts (Monday 8:00-16:00; Tuesday 12:00-20:00). At the start of every day, a prison official escorted him to a different part of the prison, and he was free to go almost anywhere and talk with anyone, allowing for rather unprecedented access to a modern maximum-security prison. The assigned areas, each with unique staff, included cellblocks, the recreation yard, hallways, the cafeteria, admissions and processing, security control rooms, vocational training rooms, and classrooms. By the end of the study, the first author had spent time in every block of the facility, including general population, protective custody, disciplinary, and orientation blocks.

Although fieldwork on the prison experience was conducted throughout all areas of the prison and with staff, for this article, we draw on group and individual interviews with inmates. For such data, the collection effort proceeded as follows. On a typical day, the first author was brought to a cellblock (or other area) and left at the correctional officer station.¹ Within an hour, the block’s state-mandated out-of-cell hour began, during which inmates are free to move within the block. The first author’s presence was a source of immediate interest to the inmates,² as there is little variation in their daily schedule. In almost every instance, a curious inmate or two, sometimes sent by a group interested in his presence, approached to inquire about his being in the prison. The first author replied that he was conducting a research project on the prison experience. A typical response to this question was “Oh, you wanna hear about experiences? I got experiences. What do you wanna know?” Then, these inmates acted as the initial contact point for a snowball sample within the block that day, as they took him back to the group that sent him to inquire about his presence, or they knew someone that they felt had a specifically relevant story. From there, the snowball sampling continued. The conversation with the initial contact often took place near the officer station, but the first author then moved freely around as this contact took him to other inmates. At this point, he was out of hearing distance of correctional officers, ensuring no bias from officer presence. If the free movement hour ended, he continued conversations through the cell door. Other times, inmates approached him, wanting to share their views after word spread in the block about the research topic. Following our ethics agreement with the Department of Corrections, prior to each conversation with inmates, the first author stated the purpose of the study and that all participation was voluntary. Although some declined, we found the inmates incredibly eager to share, such that building a rapport was rather effortless.³

To assure confidentiality of the respondents as well as for security purposes, the first author was not allowed to use recording devices. He was, however, permitted to take notes manually. Following methods for note-taking described by Lofland and Lofland (1995, pp. 89-97), he took shorthand notes throughout fieldwork, including while conducting interviews. These notes were converted daily to full field notes in a park across from the prison, filling in the shorthand notes to the greatest degree possible to preserve the actual spoken words of the participants and the day’s observations. No names were recorded, as per our agreement of confidentiality; all names used are pseudonyms. While we often refer to inmates, based on the first author’s assumptions, as younger and older in the following interviews, an exact age was not collected. To the greatest of his ability, the first author recorded the race of the respondent during note-taking, with many volunteering their race due to its relevancy to their experiences. Of the inmates interviewed, about 56% were Black, 23% were Latino, 19% were White, and 2% were Native American.⁴

Our analytic approach followed grounded theory construction (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). During the first summer, we proceeded inductively, allowing the inmates to share whatever points of view they felt were relevant concerning the prison experience and factors that make it manageable. In the first summer, when inquired about his presence, the first author replied with a general interest in the prison experience. As Bosworth et al. (2005) recommend for prison research, we let the emotions of the inmates take a central role in our data collection, allowing them to express their thoughts in whatever words they chose. The topics varied, but touched on the well-known predictors of adjustment outlined in our literature review. Given these varied topics then, the first summer’s data analysis began with open coding based upon 120 unstructured interviews, searching for the emergence of a core category. The core category of focus was unexpected negative emotional responses related to the court system, such as trial, public defenders, and appeals.

As a previously understudied source of adjustment in the literature, we chose to focus on these experiences during the second summer, allowing for “responsive interviewing” whereby interviewers formulate questions based on what they have learned as fieldwork unfolds (Rubin & Rubin, 2012). When asked about his presence during the second summer, the first author took a more deductive approach, stating that he was interested in the prison experience, particularly in relation to aspects of experiences with the court system. A short battery of questions following our theoretical codes was compiled in preparation, querying about trial, public defenders, and appeals. Although most respondents included perceptions of distributive and procedural justice directly in answering, probing questions were asked related to fairness when necessary. In total, there were 62 semi-structured interviews with unique individuals during the second summer. The data presented below come from these interviews.

After the second summer, the field notes were transcribed and coded by the first author. Following a grounded theory analytic approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), he initially coded data according to themes that emerged from the first summer and queried in the second summer. After completing the first round of coding, he reviewed each transcript, coding like categories of data together. The subsections of the results that follow (trial, public defenders, and appeals) represent the themes that emerged. We then re-read the interviews to select quotes that were representative of these themes. In the Discussion section, we use our results to situate our findings within the inmate adjustment literature as a final step in the grounded theory framework.

Results

The fieldwork yielded three main aspects of the court system that evoke negative emotional responses from inmates: going to trial, having a public defender, and attempting appeals processes. While we present them as indicators of negative emotional responses in separate subsections, we also describe how respondents often experienced them simultaneously.

Going to Trial

In general, offenders who went to trial expressed feelings of stress, anxiety, frustration, and hopelessness, believing that the court system had unfairly sentenced them. Of the 62 interviewees, 35% went to trial. At some point, all reported the ability to plea-bargain for a lesser sentence; however, because they went to trial and “lost,” they were now subject to a longer sentence for the same crime, resulting in negative emotions. Leonard, an indigent Black inmate convicted of first-degree murder, said, “I would have definitely been more content if I had plea-bargained to manslaughter like I was offered. The situation has contributed to the destruction of my self-esteem and self-concept.” Damien, a Black West Indian inmate, felt the system had failed him and “has intense feelings of depression and no control and anxiety,” that he would not have if he had plea-bargained. Thus, the fact that the same criminal act could lead to two disparate outcomes, associated with persistent second guessing, appears to affect the inmates’ sense of self and identity, as they lose a larger portion of their life to prison.

Often, those who went to trial became increasingly resentful because of the animosity cultivated for a system that they view as unjust. Due to an increased sentence from that offered in a plea-bargain, the criminal justice system becomes a target of animosity, which grows with time. Sean received a sentence 3 times as long as that offered in a plea-bargain and said that because of that “I started to look at the system as an enemy and the longer I was in, the more rebellious attitude I had towards the system.” Isaac, a middle-aged Black inmate, expressed feelings of frustration, depression, and anger and said, “Going to trial fostered an incredible hatred of the system in me. I just want to get out of here and kill cops.” Again, unfairness in the outcome of the two procedures fostered negative emotional responses.

The experience of the trial process itself also contributed to increased stress and frustration. Inmates refer to this process as “bullpen therapy,” whereby individuals are taken with a group of inmates from jail or prison to the holdings (the bullpen) of the court. Inmates experiencing bullpen therapy viewed it as worse than their current prison environment. They stay in a small holding cell throughout the business day with the other awaiting inmates, briefly removed to talk to their lawyer. Inmates complained of the small, cramped quarters, as well as the small amount of food. Frustratingly, they might be transported to the bullpen, but not seen because the workday ended, necessitating a return the next day. Often, they experienced this routine for many consecutive days, as their trial took its course or attorneys postponed their meetings. The interviewees all agreed on the detrimental psychological effects of bullpen therapy, describing it as, “psychologically brutal,” “very mentally challenging,” “like getting beat over the head and mentally draining,” “difficult and frustrating,” and taking “an incredible toll on you mentally.” One inmate even noted the need to take medication because of the distress. Bullpen therapy also contributed to inmates’ decisions to plea-bargain. Many who had experienced the process, or observed others who have, plea-bargained to avoid the stress of the trial process.

By contrast to those going to trial, individuals who plea-bargained felt that they benefited in the end because they were serving less time than under the alternative trial outcome. Respondents often expressed the resultant emotions related to going to trial or plea-bargaining as a relationship to time. Walter, a middle-aged White inmate who claimed some legal knowledge (known as “legal beagles” in prison), summarized the feelings of those who come to him who went to trial:

The guys that come to me who are coming off trial are frustrated, depressed, and don’t know where to turn. They went to trial because they didn’t do it or because they were confident they’d win and now they have all this time hanging over them . . . The guys who plea-bargain are much more content.

A member of a group of four young Black inmates who had just been transferred from a state youth prison said,

The time you’ll get if you go to court is absolutely ridiculous, so you are forced to cop out [plea-bargain]. It’s better to cop out, especially if there is any evidence against you or somebody’s word to show that you are guilty.

In a group interview with two middle-aged inmates, Solomon said, “I’ve been copping out since the eighties to crimes I know I did. I love the system the way it is. I can get away with less time for crimes I committed.” Jeff agreed, saying, “I think the system is great because I’ll eventually see the outside. Otherwise, I would have been in here for life.” Jerome, a Black inmate communicating through his cell door, corroborated, but added, “Prison is always psychologically challenging, but more so with trial because with plea-bargaining I know I will see daylight at a time in my life where I can still enjoy it.” Thus, plea-bargainers also made connections to notions of distributive justice. John, a Black inmate who had been to prison on separate occasions and experienced sentences resulting from both trial and plea-bargaining, summed the situation up well, stating,

It is definitely psychologically harder in prison when you go to trial than when you cop out. You just feel better knowing your time, which is usually shorter when you cop out, rather than getting stuck with a long sentence.

The pressure to plea-bargain could also potentially undermine procedural justice. Yet, as our next section shows, negative emotions related to procedural justice are not so much a result of pressure to enter a plea, but rather legal representation behind this perceived pressure.

Public Defenders

Our data showed that interviewees expressed heightened negative emotions related to public legal representation, comparing their procedures and outcomes to the hypothetical case of having had a private attorney. This comparison of distributive and procedural justice is a personal one, as there are few inmates with private attorneys in which to compare outcomes. Among our interviewees, only 7% had private attorneys. Still, inmates often felt frustrated because they view the system as biased, with public defenders looking out for the interests of the state rather than their clients. No interviewee expressed a positive perception of public defenders. All those with public representation believed that they would have experienced different sentencing results had they been able to afford a private attorney, supporting notions of both procedural and distributive justice. This frustration was further compounded by the realization that money could play such a large role in a life-altering process, often fostering feelings in them that the system is classist and racist.

Public defenders were also perceived as disregarding the defendant’s interests to such an extent that they have earned the nickname “public pretenders” among our respondents. In reference to public defenders, Juan said, “When you are behind those doors, all you think about if you went to trial is how you put your life in someone else’s hands. You got to wonder if they’re working for you or the state.” Jorge, a young Latino inmate, felt that public defenders and the court system are playing a game with your life, “It’s basically a gamble with your life. You got the prosecutor, attorney, and judge sitting around over lunch discussing your life. They all work for the state; your life is of little interest to them.” While recognizing that public defenders are overworked, most inmates believed that they are only interested in lessening their workload, regardless of whether the inmate was innocent.

Another source of frustration related to public defenders was their presumption of the defendant’s guilt. Most inmates expressed that public defenders never presumed their innocence, but rather immediately began to advise plea-bargaining. Many said that their lack of personal knowledge of the criminal justice system and lack of optimism from the public defender implied that they had no choice but to plea-bargain. These feelings further perpetuated the view that public defenders only protect the interests of the state. A quote from Morgan, a young Black inmate who said that he had no money, resources, or knowledge and thus was forced to plea-bargain, summarized these perceptions well, expressing frustration over statements from his public defender such as, “If you don’t cop out, we will take you to trial.” Thus, even the language used by public defenders, as described by interviewees, furthered the perception of public defenders as “double agents.”

The belief that public defenders are bad lawyers was a further source of frustration, especially for those who went to trial. During a group interview, Joe, a young Black inmate, said, “Public defenders make trials worse. They don’t do the right things.” Many recalled experiences where they became frustrated because they felt a public defender “blew their case.” Several revealed stories about how public defenders did not do their job properly, with comments such as the following:

Chris:

“I had a public defender who didn’t do his job. I had many chances to beat my case but my lawyer did a horrible job.”

Mark:

“He refused to argue my case. It makes me feel like I got a raw deal and I’d really like to put my foot in his ass.”

Jeff:

“My public defender didn’t do a good job defending me. He said there was no way that I would beat trial, yet I know I didn’t do anything.”

Tom:

“Public defenders get you to cop out so they can get their job done quickly and then move on to the next client. Public defenders do not research your case; they just go through it quickly.”

Regardless of whether this view of public defenders is justified, the perceived view of public defenders was a source of frustration for inmates related to ideas surrounding procedural justice.

Study participants also expressed frustration regarding public defenders due to their lack of financial resources at the time of their arrest. Regardless of whether they went to trial or plea-bargained, most believed that they would have gotten less time, or none at all, had they had the resources to afford private representation. As Tom stated,

Hired attorneys research your case and really look out for you to see that you get a fair deal. If you have the money to hire good lawyers, you get a better deal. Public defenders do not explain the law to you and what your options are. Hired attorneys will do this.

Ivan said that he had a public defender and had to plea-bargain because he had no money and did not know English at the time, stating that, “[This] just lowered my self-esteem and my trust in the judicial system.” This distrust in the system was a common sentiment among those who had no resources. Furthermore, many lacked any knowledge of the law at the time of their arrest and subsequent time in court. For example, Maurice said, “I was arrested when I was 18 and so I was young and didn’t know much about the law. So the police and the court system took advantage of that.” For the inmate, this lack of knowledge of the law often meant plea-bargaining as instructed by a public defender. Victor, a young Latino inmate, said, “I knew nothing about the law when I was arrested. I had to take a 1-year plea. They told me I’d get 10 if I went to trial.” Efrain, a 19-year-old Latino inmate who was convicted at 15 years of age, commented similarly that he had to plea-bargain because he was told to and was too young to know any different. Wesley, a Black West Indian inmate who claimed to be a legal beagle, said,

I truly believe that there is plenty of inmates locked up that wouldn’t have lost at trial if they had a private attorney. It makes me psychologically heated because such a simple factor, like money, could determine one’s life chances within the justice system. It really brings out the inequality of the system.

Thus, a lack of resources and knowledge of the law in the face of difficult decisions resulted in considerable anger and frustration that began at arrest and continued into an inmate’s sentence.

This need for money and resources was the source of feelings of classism and racial injustice among some nonwhite inmates. Isaac said that the inequality in the system fostered a hatred of Whites in him, subsequently leading him to become an orthodox Black Muslim. Morgan, the young Black indigent inmate quoted above, noted that the perception that public defenders work for the state made him view the system as very racially biased. Since his incarceration, he expressed that he has come to hate whites and has become very militant in his viewpoints.

Those few inmates who had private attorneys expressed a level of contentment and acceptance of their outcome, expressing that they received the best sentence for their given situation. Miguel, a young Latino prisoner, said, “I have an easily accessible private lawyer and the psychological strain is not so great as those I see who had public defenders. I’ve come to accept my charges.” Tyrone, a young Black inmate who had started with a public defender but switched to private attorneys, expressed decreased stress and frustration after the change. He said that he had a public defender at trial “who knew the information needed for acquittal, but the public defender already mentally felt he was guilty. Now I have a private lawyer and that has definitely helped.” Doug, a young White inmate, said that his original public defender blew his case and he felt “ridiculously frustrated.” Since then, he hired a private lawyer who has won an appeal for him and another private lawyer who is attempting a retrial. With this, he said, “all the psychological burdens are relieved and my time is much easier. Previous to that was nothing but frustration.” Doug’s comments on appeals highlight another factor of the criminal justice system that resulted in increased emotional distress, to which we now turn.

Appeals Processes

The appeals process, or processes of sentence modification, was also a source of negative emotions among inmates. Of our sample, 26% reported attempting an appeal at some point in their sentence. The simple factor of waiting through this lengthy process was an incredible source of stress. Winning an appeal or receiving a sentence modification was associated with immense relief. However, when such processes failed to alter one’s sentence, stress, frustration, and hopelessness followed. Inmates’ external connections to people who can assist with appeals processes, such as family, friends, and occasionally inmate advocacy groups, played a large role in the amount of distress experienced. From the inside, appeals seekers felt as though nothing can be accomplished. With outsiders pushing for appeals and sentence modification, however, the situation seemed less hopeless. Those who had no connections on the outside and had a public defender were even more frustrated because they claimed they were no longer a priority for the public defender once in prison.

Getting the process of appeals or sentence modification started was often the source of much frustration. During a group interview with four participants (two Black, one Latino, and one White), having people on the outside to assist them was reported as important. The middle-aged Black inmate in the group said the process “kills psychologically.” While the young Black inmate said, “the appeals process is awful because there are so many levels to deal with and it is not easy to get the process started.” The group considered connections to the outside very important throughout the stressful appeals process. These men said that with no one to contact when seeking an appeal or to push along proceedings, they felt like they have no control. Tyrone went to trial and said of his appeals,

You’re always reading and writing to people on the outside. The hardest thing is trying to get someone’s attention on the outside. You have to write to the right people and try to show them what’s going on in your head so that they can understand and help you. My family has been back and forth with support and that is very difficult.

With no one on the outside to help, an inmate must get the appeals process started himself. John said, “It is very frustrating because I have to do everything myself. It’s a lonely road.” Leonard said he has many problems trying to get appeals out because he must do everything on his own, taking 16 months just to talk to someone. He also said it is “hard to deal with the frustration of waiting.”

Those without external assistance in the appeals process had only the resources at their disposal within the prison, such as the law library, another point that affects levels of frustration and hopelessness. During a group interview, four participants said that the law library can take weeks to access because of the need to request permission. Furthermore, the library was very outdated, lacking resources such as the Internet. They typically went to the library, not even knowing what they were looking for, and the lack of help from the library staff was stressful. For them, legal beagles were much more helpful than the law library. John echoed this group’s comments, stating, “There are no resources on the inside to help, which just enhances the frustration . . . The law library is outdated and I had to learn how to do all my law research on my own.” In a group interview, it was reported that the appeals process is hard on inmates because they must take initiative in something about which they know very little. For some, doing law research was impossible. For example, Doug said, “I have a ninth grade reading level and know nothing about law research, so I could never help myself.” For those without outside connections, this roadblock to pushing sentence modifications through was an enormous source of frustration.

The period during an appeals or sentence modification process was a time of very high stress. This frustration was revisited daily when mail is distributed and an individual fails to receive legal documents. Damien described his situation above as one of intense depression, loss of control, and anxiety. He attributed some of these feelings to waiting every day for legal mail and a response to his habeas corpus requested 4 years prior to our interview. The frustration of waiting culminated when the process comes to an end, bringing either intense relief because of a successful sentence modification or immense stress due to a failed appeal. Those who lost appeals described feelings of bitter disappointment and frustration, while those who won appeals or sentence modifications were relieved and their time was eased, as Doug described above. Skip, a middle-aged White inmate, said that he was content because he won an appeal, was granted a retrial, and is confident that he will get out soon. He also said, “If I had lost the appeal, I would have gone nuts. I would have gotten sent to segregation and kicked out of the facility.” Again, much of the distress expressed was in terms of both procedural and distributive justice.

Discussion

In response to criticisms that theories of procedural and distributive justice neglect serious criminal offenders, Casper et al. (1988) demonstrated that perceptions of fairness among this small, yet important, group were indeed based on both procedure and outcome. Research with serious criminal offenders and inmates has continued to concentrate on the effects of each on perceptions of fairness (Baker et al., 2014; Reisig & Mesko, 2009). Here instead, we follow work that considers the outcomes of these perceptions (Tatar et al., 2012). Building on this survey research, we used qualitative data to locate the specific components of the court system that are the locus of perceived unfairness and their effects on emotional responses among inmates. Through analysis of inmate firsthand accounts, our fieldwork provides a nuanced understanding of the consequences of perceptions of fairness in the court system among a population of incarcerated men.

In line with Casper et al. (1988), we found evidence for the effects on perceived fairness of procedural and distributive justice. For the latter, inmates described the outcomes emerging from both the trial process and utilization of public defenders as disproportionate, comparing their realized situation to an offered plea-bargain and hypothetical alternative of having a private attorney, respectively. In terms of procedure, interviewees focused on unfairness regarding resources as related to public defenders, lack of connections on the outside, and unfamiliarity with the workings of the criminal justice system. Following research demonstrating that perceived injustices are associated with negative emotions (Markovsky, 1988; Mikula et al., 1998), inmates in our study expressed heightened negative emotions related to each of these court system domains. We found that perceptions of fairness are related to a comparison to an alternative procedure or outcome, leading to higher levels of frustration, stress, resentment, and hopelessness (Jasso, 1980, 1993).

We approached our research question using a grounded theory analytic framework (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We proceeded inductively over the course of two summers, using our fieldwork in the first summer to develop a more refined interview schedule in the second summer. In line with the general goals of grounded theory, which are to build theory inductively from data, we conclude by situating our court system factors within the wider literature on inmate adjustment, supported also by Tatar et al.’s (2012) survey of women inmates, as shown in the proposed theoretical model in Figure 1. We take the three factors defined in the literature review and add perceptions of distributive and procedural justice. While we concentrated on court system factors, prior research also indicates that inmate attitudes about fairness are related to policing (Baker et al., 2014) and the prison itself (Reisig & Mesko, 2009) and thus possibly also to negative emotions and adjustment which we include. In the model, each of the factors, depicted with examples, exerts main effects upon inmate psychological adjustment. These factors, however, are not necessarily independent of one another (Kruttschnitt & Vuolo, 2007). Therefore, we also expect the effect of prison institutional factors and individual psychological factors to vary by background factors, as shown via indirect effects. Similarly, we expect the effect of prison institutional factors to vary by individual psychological factors. While we cannot determine from our qualitative data whether there was variation in the court system factors by the other three factors in the model, we nonetheless include indirect effects as a possibility here as well. For example, the effect of going to trial and resultant increased sentence time may be related to individual-level time management abilities. Similarly, stress and frustration resulting from appeals processes are likely related to prison institutional factors, such as law library access, as well as background factors indicative of indigent status.

Figure 1.

Factors that affect prisoner psychological adjustment.

Recognizing the limitations of our study, we do not claim that our results are generalizable across all prison populations, given that our fieldwork occurred at one maximum-security prison.⁵ Furthermore, we did not formally measure mental health or adjustment, instead allowing the study participants to describe their emotions in whatever words they chose (Bosworth et al., 2005). Finally, our ethnography cannot address causal order, such that those predisposed to negative emotions may be more likely to blame those emotions on factors such as court system experiences. With this inductive grounded theory approach, however, our results provide easily testable hypotheses for future research utilizing a formal measure of stress, depression, or adjustment. Such research may then result in a need to refine the proposed model further, perhaps considering mediating effects, causal order, and feedback loops.

While we describe the three court system indicators of negative emotions separately, we hypothesize from our data that they might also interact. We find, in particular, that indigent inmates were very often in a situation where all the factors of court system distress appear, as exemplified by the hardships of Robert, a young Native American inmate. Robert had a public defender and went to trial, where he received a 35-year sentence after being offered a 9-year plea-bargain. He had no prior knowledge of the law, yet wishes to try for an appeal. However, he lacks external connections as to who can assist with this legal process, and his public defender has chosen not to pursue his request. Robert expressed how depressed and frustrated he always is, and his example reiterates the role of resources.

Each aspect of the court system has various implications for incarcerated persons. First, we found that the decision of trial or plea-bargain has consequences beyond length of sentence, such that we hypothesize that equal sentences will result in heightened negative emotion when one is the result of trial and the other plea-bargain, due to the comparison with the alternative outcome. This finding supports past studies which demonstrate that the meaning of time is relative for the incarcerated individual (Jewkes, 2002; Tatar et al., 2012). Some of the emotions experienced by inmates who went to trial may also result from the stress of coping with a wrongful conviction (Campbell & Denov, 2004), although this fact is difficult to verify empirically. Second, negative emotions emerged from the procedural unfairness associated with public defenders. Inmates’ perceptions of public defenders could derive from the common discourse of public defenders as “double agents” (Uphoff, 1992), who are workers for the state more interested in results than the fate of any one individual defendant. Perhaps, the inmate did not “get a raw deal” (Hartley et al., 2010), but rather is adopting this common discourse. Regardless, this perception had a real impact on the incarcerated men we interviewed. Third, the emotions expressed by appeals seekers who have connections to the outside demonstrate another aspect of court and correctional systems where resources are important. Identifying many of the same problems, such as illiteracy and internal resources, Jacob and Sharma (1970) recognized long ago the lack of and need for free and expanded legal services for the incarcerated. According to our research, fulfillment of this objective has not come far, especially for those who lacked the ability to get the process started. These aspects of the criminal justice system resulted in negative emotions for these incarcerated men and created or solidified perceptions of a classist and racist criminal justice system.

The stressors described here can also have adverse effects on the prison environment. Individual stress levels are a significant predictor of prison misconducts (Gendreau, Goggin, & Law, 1997). In addition, Toch (1982) describes the role of feedback loops in prisoner stress. Stress can cause an inmate to behave in a manner that has disciplinary consequences, which, in turn, increases tension and reactions to these feelings, creating an endless cycle. Such reactions can occur at the collective level, producing a situation that endangers institutional safety for inmates and correctional staff and undermines efforts at corrections (Johnson & Toch, 1982; Randol & Campbell, 2017). Addressing the sources of distress we presented provides one avenue for decreasing volatility in an already stressful environment.

The effects continue well beyond the prison walls, however, as incarceration has lasting effects on health (Massoglia, 2008). This study demonstrates that the court system experience warrants further examination as a source of negative emotions and, potentially, prisoner adjustment to incarceration. The three factors outlined in our research illustrate that processes and procedures, occurring both prior to and during imprisonment, had enduring effects on incarcerated persons. These aspects of the court system and the relationship to negative emotions could easily go overlooked, as prisoners’ voices are seldom heard. Our fieldwork allowed for a unique approach to studying this hard-to reach-population (Wacquant, 2002). This investigation demonstrated that such voices are important in efforts to reform certain aspects of the court system in a manner that would reduce distress and alleviate some of the negative aspects of corrections and its enduring effects. These psychological effects are all the more important as increasing numbers of prisoners return home in an era of mass incarceration.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Rachel Einwohner, Brian Kelly, Candace Kruttschnitt, Sarah Lageson, and Robin Stryker for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Notes

Author Biographies

Mike Vuolo, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology at the Ohio State University. His research interests include crime, law, and deviance; health; work and education; substance use; the life course; and statistics and methodology. He is currently the Editor of Sociological Methodology, the official methods journal of the American Sociological Association.

Bradley R. E. Wright, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut where he studies religion and well-being.

Sadé L. Lindsay is a sociology PhD candidate at the Ohio State University and a Ruth D. Peterson fellow of the American Society of Criminology. Her research focuses on inequality, incarceration and reetry, substance use, and mass violence.

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