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.
"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
"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."
