"Inmate Responses to Experiences With Court System Procedural and Distributive Justice"

The title of this post is the title of this recently published work authored by Mike Vuolo, Bradley Wright and Sadé Lindsay.  Here is the piece's abstract and concluding paragraph:

According to criminal justice theories, perceptions of procedural and distributive justice drive opinions on fairness, subsequently affecting behavior. We contend that such perceptions also affect the emotional states of incarcerated individuals, identifying court experiences as the focus of our study.  Through fieldwork at a male maximum-security prison, we find that inmates expressed negative emotional responses associated with three factors: trial, public defenders, and appeals.  Participants described perceived fairness through personal comparisons to alternative procedures and outcomes often connected to socioeconomic resources and related perceptions to emotions such as frustration, regret, resentment, and hopelessness. We situate our findings within theories of fairness and inmate adjustment research....

The effects continue well beyond the prison walls, however, as incarceration has lasting effects on health (Massoglia, 2008).  This study demonstrates that the court system experience warrants further examination as a source of negative emotions and, potentially, prisoner adjustment to incarceration.  The three factors outlined in our research illustrate that processes and procedures, occurring both prior to and during imprisonment, had enduring effects on incarcerated persons.  These aspects of the court system and the relationship to negative emotions could easily go overlooked, as prisoners’ voices are seldom heard. Our fieldwork allowed for a unique approach to studying this hard-to reach-population (Wacquant, 2002).  This investigation demonstrated that such voices are important in efforts to reform certain aspects of the court system in a manner that would reduce distress and alleviate some of the negative aspects of corrections and its enduring effects. These psychological effects are all the more important as increasing numbers of prisoners return home in an era of mass incarceration.