Prisoner Grievances in California: Disputing Behind Bars

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines the inmate grievance system in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) whose thirty-three adult prisons house the largest prison population in the United States. Treating inmate grievances as disputes, this research examines the dynamics of conflict resolution in the extreme hierarchical setting of prison. The focus is on the meaning of the grievance process from the point of view of inmates and prison officials, how these meanings get inscribed in the written grievance narratives, their links to different institutional locations, and their interactive quality. The research hypotheses incorporate expectations that most inmate grievances fail as legal maneuvers, and that the process is heavily asymmetrical; that prisoners have various incentives for filing a grievance; that inmates' narratives shift and evolve over time in interaction with officials' responses, while official narratives tend to be more stable and reflect institutional strategies for the containment of disruption; and, that while the internal grievance system may represent a narrow and individualizing method of prisoner contestation, nonetheless it may be empowering at a subjective level. The data are from CDCR annual reports; the CDCR's Offender Based Information System; a random sample of 456 inmate grievance forms; and, semi-structured interviews with prison officials and inmates in three California men's prisons. The research will add to the theoretical literature on legal consciousness, disputing, and conflict resolution. It will shed light on issues of profound constitutional and human consequences, with the larger hope of revealing areas for improvement in the principal process whereby inmates contest conditions of confinement.