Book Review: Appealing to justice: Prisoner grievances,rights,and carceral logic

Appealing to Justice examines how both inmates and correctional staff view the inmate grievance process within the California prison system. There has been minimal research in this area; this book attempts to fill this void by drawing from inmate interviews, staff interviews, and basic descriptive data on grievances. Through various data collection methods, the authors provide both a broad overview and personal experiences from inmates and correctional staff.

The book opens with a comprehensive overview of how the prisoner grievance system was created in the mid-1990s as a response to the voluminous number of inmate lawsuits filed in federal court (in 1995, there were approximately 40,000 inmate lawsuits which comprised almost 20% of the entire federal civil docket). In 1996, the Prison Litigation Reform Act was enacted, restricting inmates’ ability to file lawsuits. Under this legislation, inmates would now have to exhaust the internal grievance procedures in the prison system before they could file in federal court. The authors then go on to describe California’s three-level formal grievance process. At each level, the grievance can be granted, partially granted, or denied. If the inmate is not satisfied with the response at any of the levels, they can file an appeal to the next higher level. It is only after reaching the highest internal level at the Office of Inmate Appeals in Sacramento that an inmate can then file a lawsuit in federal court.

This book effectively juxtaposes inmates and staff perceptions of the inmate grievance system. A couple of common themes emerged in interviews of both correctional staff and inmates. Although at different points in the interviews both staff and inmates described the process in cynical terms, both thought that the system was necessary to maintain a safe and secure prison environment. Another theme that emerged is that both staff and inmates agreed that there were some inmates who filed numerous grievances, many of which were for menial reasons.

Although there was agreement between staff and inmates on some themes, there were also separate themes highlighted by each. One theme continuously highlighted by staff was the workload involved in processing the unending amount of claims and the importance of moving them along. As a result, following policy and procedure sometimes outweigh the efforts to find out the truth; this was therefore not necessarily a route to identify and fix unacceptable practices or conditions in the prison. However, they noted that the grievance process is actually one way to learn about what is going on in the institution and it is an important instrument for inmates to make their concerns known and is therefore a good managerial tool.

Inmates, on the other hand, noted the importance of staying out of trouble and doing their time. Also consistently mentioned was the fear that correctional officers would retaliate against grievances (especially staff misconduct) by changing release dates, initiating transfers to other prisons, or searching cells or lockers more often. Even though the overwhelming majority of inmate complaints are ultimately denied (approximately 93%), they still believed the system was as fair as it could be and have not lost faith in the law.

This book sheds light on the reasons inmate’s filed grievances and how administrators responded to these grievances, which has rarely been examined. A content analysis of the 292 inmate grievances was completed in which the justification for both the complaint and the response was categorized. Although inmates were typically filing for legal rights reasons, needs, or accountability, administrators usually denied the petition citing bureaucratic or policy-related reasons. The authors found that administrators had a list of generic text they use to respond to particular kinds of grievances which simply referred the procedure(s) or guideline(s) used to deny the inmate’s request. As a result, there was never any substantive dialogue between the inmate and the administration.

Although this book gives us insight into an understudied area, a richer contextualization of the institutional environment, characteristics of the prison population, and more details about the interviewees would have been helpful. For example, even though the authors briefly mention that the maximum security prison they visited had one of the highest rates of grievance filings in the California system, the reader is still left wondering what factors contributed to that high level. In addition, while there is the logic to separating inmate and staff interviews into different chapters, the ability to compare both staff and inmates’ perceptions from the same institution would have been useful.

Generally, this book takes a more qualitative than quantitative approach. While the qualitative work was appropriately used to identify themes of interest among inmates and correctional staff, other questions remain. The reader was left wondering who is more likely to file grievances, are inmates with shorter (or longer) sentences more likely to file, are they younger (or older), are they White (or Black), are they in higher (or lower) security levels, do they have more (or less) disciplinary problems, or are they in prison for the first time? Does the institutional environment contribute to more (or less) grievances, such as the tenure of staff, cleaner prisons, less crowded prisons, strong management, and prisons with less inmate misconduct? These questions may have been beyond the scope of this book or the authors may not have had access to the appropriate data to examine these issues. Nonetheless this book provides a good starting point for further research in an area that merits more attention than it has gotten.