Explore the vast range of titles available.

Previous literature on disputing and legal mobilization suggests that stigmatized, self-blaming, and/or vulnerable populations often face insurmountable barriers to naming a situation as injurious and claiming redress. Contrary to what one would expect from this literature, prisoners in the United States—among the most stigmatized and vulnerable of populations—file tens of thousands of grievances annually. To explore this apparent paradox, we draw on an unprecedented data set comprised of interviews with a random sample of 120 men in three California prisons. Our data reveal that these prisoners are willing and able to name problems, and most of them have filed at least one grievance. While some expressed self-blame and most said there was retaliation for filing a grievance, the majority overcame these impediments to filing. We argue that the context of prison—a total institution in which law is a hypervisible force—enhances this form of legal mobilization by prisoners, trumping the social and psychological factors that the context otherwise produces and that in other populations tamp down claims making. The pattern of these prisoners' claims, however, reveals that they are by no means immune to the countervailing pressures. While staff disrespect was named frequently as a problem in prison, grievances against staff were relatively rare. In concluding, we note that the U.S. Supreme Court recently found California prisons violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a finding that reveals the inadequacy of the inmate appeals system despite prisoners' repeated efforts to hold the state accountable.

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 Justiceis 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 Justicereveals a system fraught with impediments and dilemmas, which delivers neither justice, nor efficiency, nor constitutional conditions of confinement.

Originating as a keynote address delivered at the Western Society of Criminology, this article focuses on the complex and fraught relationship between LGBTQ communities and law enforcement, historically and in the present. Situating current LGBTQ–police relations in a historical context as revealed by pivotal events occurring in New York and Los Angeles, it first emphasizes a history of police violence against LGBTQ people. Thereafter, this article draws on original survey data to reveal that LGBTQ people are more likely to see the police as “foe” rather than “friend,” are less willing to call the police for help, and are more supportive of three types of policing reform (defunding the police, reallocating funds for police, and disbanding the police) compared to non-LGBTQ people. In addition to these disparities between LGBTQ people and non-LGBTQ people, there are differences within the LGBTQ community. These and other findings are situated in a larger context in which studies reveal that LGBTQ people are overpoliced and underserved. The implications of these historical legacies, empirical findings, and calls for policy reform are presented as the basis for future research that can enrich theory, policy, and practice.

Historically developed along gender lines and arguably the most sex segregated of institutions, U.S. prisons are organized around the assumption of a gender binary. In this context, the existence and increasing visibility of transgender prisoners raise questions about how gender is accomplished by transgender prisoners in prisons for men. This analysis draws on official data and original interview data from 315 transgender inmates in 27 California prisons for men to focus analytic attention on the pursuit of \"the real deal\"—a concept we develop to reference a dynamic related to how gender is accomplished by transgender inmates. Specifically, among transgender inmates in prisons for men, there is competition for the attention and affection of \"real men \"in prisons: the demonstrable and well-articulated desire to secure standing as \"the best girl\" in sex segregated institutional environments. Our empirical examination sheds light on the gender order that underpins prison life, the lived experience of gender and sexuality for transgender inmates in prisons for men, and how that experience reveals new aspects of the workings of gender accountability.

Social scientists have long investigated the social, cultural, and psychological forces that shape perceptions of fairness. A vast literature on procedural justice advances a central finding: the process by which a dispute is played out is central to people's perceptions of fairness and their satisfaction with dispute outcomes. There is, however, one glaring gap in the literature. In this era of mass incarceration, studies of how the incarcerated weigh procedural justice versus substantive justice are rare. This article addresses this gap by drawing on unique quantitative and qualitative data, including face-to-face interviews with a random sample of men incarcerated in three California prisons and official data provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Our mixed-methods analysis reveals that these prisoners privilege the actual outcomes of disputes as their barometer of justice. We argue that the dominance of substantive outcomes in these men's perceptions of fairness and in their dispute satisfaction is grounded in, among other things, the high stakes of the prison context, an argument that is confirmed by our data. These findings do not refute the importance of procedural justice, but show the power of institutional context to structure perceptions of and responses to fairness, one of the most fundamental principles of social life.

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called \"hate crime general orders\" from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a \"genealogy of law\" to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law-on-the-books and law-in-action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo-institutional scholarship on law.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to briefly address three interrelated areas of concerns – victimization, housing placement and healthcare provision – related to the health and welfare of transgender women in jails, prisons and other types of detention facilities.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on a growing body of research on health risks for transgender women who are detained in facilities in California and elsewhere, the authors provide recommendations for policy and practice that constitutes gender-affirming healthcare for transgender women behind bars.FindingsPolicymakers, correctional leaders, and prison-based clinicians have a number of opportunities to address the welfare of transgender women in jails, prisons and other types of detention facilities.Originality/valueThis policy brief offers concrete steps government officials can take to better meet their professional and constitutional obligations, provide higher quality care for transgender women involved in the criminal justice system, and effectuate positive changes in transgender women’s health and welfare both inside and outside of carceral environments.

Previous literature on disputing and legal mobilization suggests that stigmatized, self-blaming, and/or vulnerable populations often face insurmountable barriers to naming a situation as injurious and claiming redress. Contrary to what one would expect from this literature, prisoners in the United States-among the most stigmatized and vulnerable of populations-file tens of thousands of grievances annually. To explore this apparent paradox, we draw on an unprecedented data set comprised of interviews with a random sample of 120 men in three California prisons. Our data reveal that these prisoners are willing and able to name problems, and most of them have filed at least one grievance. While some expressed self-blame and most said there was retaliation for filing a grievance, the majority overcame these impediments to filing. We argue that the context of prison-a total institution in which law is a hypervisible force-enhances this form of legal mobilization by prisoners, trumping the social and psychological factors that the context otherwise produces and that in other populations tamp down claims making. The pattern of these prisoners' claims, however, reveals that they are by no means immune to the countervailing pressures. While staff disrespect was named frequently as a problem in prison, grievances against staff were relatively rare. In concluding, we note that the U.S. Supreme Court recently found California prisons violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a finding that reveals the inadequacy of the inmate appeals system despite prisoners' repeated efforts to hold the state accountable. Adapted from the source document.

Over the last few decades, a steady stream of books decry the decline of the public intellectual in modern life, while academics continue to express the desire to \"make a difference\" by producing research that contributes to the amelioration of social problems. In this context, this article draws on basic and applied research on transgender prisoners in California as a case study to address larger questions about the pursuit of knowledge, the creation of policy, the prompting of praxis, and the promise of justice. The empirical research on transgender prisoners in prisons for men presented in this article begins with a decidedly specific policy question (how to keep transgender prisoners safe from sexual assault in prison) and ends with basic research that interrogates the social organization and workings of gender (how is gender accomplished among transgender prisoners in prisons for men). Reviewing this research and presenting a few instructive digressions referred to as \"sidebars\" leads to two conclusions: (1) The line between basic and policy work cannot be effectively erased (nor should it be), and (2) basic and applied research can be treated as productively interdependent (i.e., take us to new research paths and generate new insights). By operating side-by-side, basic and policy research can provide us with general and particularistic understandings of social processes and structures that ultimately help us make a difference in the lives of those who suffer the most from systems of inequality, in this case transgender women subject to state authority.