Appealing to Justice is an unprecedented study of disputing in prison and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. The authors gained unique access to California prisoners and correctional officers, as well as to thousands of prisoners’ grievances. Quoting extensively from these data, they give voice to those who are rarely heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms in the literature—for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable populations to launch disputes—and they do it with sometimes striking poignancy. The book is at once an empirically rich por ... More

Appealing to Justice is an unprecedented study of disputing in prison and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. The authors gained unique access to California prisoners and correctional officers, as well as to thousands of prisoners’ grievances. Quoting extensively from these data, they give voice to those who are rarely heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms in the literature—for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable populations to launch disputes—and they do it with sometimes striking poignancy. The book is at once an empirically rich portrayal of legal mobilization and legal consciousness behind bars and a theoretically driven analysis of the conflicting logics underlying the contemporary U.S. prison system and the (post) civil rights society into which it is inserted. In their sweeping but concise analysis, the authors argue that the confluence of rights consciousness and the culture of punitive control—two of the defining logics of our age—has set in motion a seismic tension that is found in its most primal form in the contemporary prison and its internal grievance system. Ultimately, Appealing to Justice reveals a system that is fraught with institutional and cultural dilemmas and that delivers neither justice nor efficiency nor constitutional conditions of confinement.