Appealing to justice: prisoner grievances, rights, and carceral logic

'Appealing to Justice' is at once an empirically rich portrayal of legal mobilisation 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.