Dispute Resolution in Prison: The California Experience
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Description
Jim, a seventeen-year-old boy in a California Youth Authority (CYA) institution, summed up CYA's grievance procedure: “Without grievance, we wouldn't have rights. Rights would be meaningless. They would be favors.” The difference between a favor and a right is power. In a prison, the people with power are “the authorities”—the guards, the administration, the warden. The only check on the arbitrary exercise of that power lies with the courts; but the courts, traditionally and even today, are reluctant to intervene between people in prison and prison authorities. The result is a real potential for arbitrariness, especially about “small” things, where judicial help is even less likely. But what is “small” to outsiders may be magnified many times to a person with no control over his world, no power to retreat and hide, no freedom of choice. The ability to enforce the decision to keep a favorite wall poster in one's room or to have the full twenty-five minutes allotted for dinner is important because, cumulatively, such decisions allow people whose freedom has been denied the power to still mediate their environment, to organize, however modestly, the world about them. Multiply dozens or scores of irritations, and place them in the atmosphere of a prison, and you have the mix that can make for an explosion if the spark is set off at a time when pressure is high. Against this background, the availability of a grievance procedure becomes important. And although the cases dealt with may appear trivial to the outsider, they are not to the prisoners. California's experiment with a ward (or inmate) grievance procedure in Youth Authority institutions is a middle way to protect inmate rights on issues the courts cannot easily handle. It is a way to promote human autonomy within walls. It recognizes that the inability to assert minor, even petty, claims when the sense of fairness is challenged, takes on tremendous importance to people who are locked up.
Source Publication
Roundtable Justice: Case Studies in Conflict Resolution: Reports to the Ford Foundation
Source Editors/Authors
Robert B. Goldmann
Publication Date
1980
Recommended Citation
Gillers, Stephen, "Dispute Resolution in Prison: The California Experience" (1980). Faculty Chapters. 1252.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1252
