Valerie Jenness

• University of California, Irvine

This research draws on original data to empirically assess how an array of factors – including features of the self, the prison environment, and prisoners’ interactions with each other – shape the probability of transgender women in prisons for men experiencing sexual victimization and non-sexual physical assault. Logistic regression analyses revea...

President Biden has called for reform of the criminal justice system to ensure fair treatment of people who are transgender who come into contact with the criminal justice system. He has done so in a context in which criminologists, public health researchers, and others, including journalists and advocates, have produced a growing body of research...

In this article, we investigate the degree to which prison shapes transgender women’s perceptions of themselves as gendered people in prisons for men. Drawing on original data collected from 315 transgender women in 27 prisons for men in California, a mixed-methods analysis reveals that transgender women in prisons for men report higher levels of s...

In this article, we conjoin two long‐standing lines of inquiry in criminology—the study of prison life and the study of sexual assault—by using original qualitative and quantitative data from 315 transgender women incarcerated in 27 California men's prisons. In so doing, we advance an analysis of the factors and processes that shape their experienc...

A large body of social science consistently documents race differences in the U.S. criminal justice system and in related perceptions of justice. It is now beyond dispute that the criminal justice system is racialized in a plethora of ways that have consequences for how people perceive justice. Another vast body of literature documents the importan...

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, o...

Recognizing that prisons house diverse populations in equally diverse types of environments, we utilize a unique data set and employ two well-known sociological concepts—collective identity and collective efficacy—to examine overlapping communities in which transgender women in prisons for men are situated and experience prison life. Findings from...

This chapter provides an overview of the Prison Litigation Reform Act within the context of the skyrocketing prison population and advances in legal-rights consciousness. The authors show that the predicted decline in prisoner litigation subsequent to the PLRA never occurred; instead, there was a dramatic increase in prisoner grievance filing. The...

This chapter focuses on correctional staff as organizational actors who share institutional loyalties and a commitment to carceral logic but who hold different positions in the organization and are thus oriented differently vis-à-vis the incarceration/rights tension. Drawing from the scholarship on administrative decision making, the chapter outlin...

This chapter reveals that nearly half of the men the authors interviewed believe in the fairness of the system in general and have faith in law and in evidence as the key ingredients in winning an appeal. Also, many prisoners viewed CDCR officials as human beings who are simply doing a job, and they spoke of other prisoners as abusers of the grieva...

Chapter 3 presents findings from interviews with prisoners, focusing on what prisoners named as problems, what they said they have filed grievances on, and what consequences they anticipated. The frequency of these prisoners’ naming and claiming is inconsistent with findings in the literature on disputing, legal mobilization, and “trouble.” Despite...

This chapter focuses on the official grievances to trace frames deployed by prisoners and staff across four levels of review. It reveals that these written documents present, in their hardened form, the respective logics of rights and confinement. Comprised of prisoners’ narratives and officials’ responses, the official grievances offer a dramatic...

This chapter traces the impact of the conflicting logics of rights and carceral control on prison staff. Almost all of these staff acknowledged that filing a grievance is a legitimate prisoner right and that the grievance system is a useful managerial tool, but they ridiculed prisoners who file grievances and trivialized their appeals. Drawing on a...

This chapter sums up the findings and discusses their implications for understanding disputing, legal mobilization, and legal consciousness, as well as prison life itself. The authors emphasize that institutional and structural location are critical to making sense of the findings, some of which appear at first glance to be counterintuitive and inc...

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 ra...

The introduction provides an overview of the book, briefly describing prison conditions, criticisms of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the prisoner grievance process, and the existing literature on legal mobilization and disputing. The authors note that the extensiveness of prisoner grievance filing is inconsistent with...

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...

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 anal...

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, even in the face of seemingly dramatic harms. Contrary to this literature, prisoners in the United States—among the most stigmatized and vul...

Drawing on official data and original interview data on 315 transgender inmates in California prisons for men, this research provides the first empirical portrayal of a prison population in California that is unique by virtue of being both transgender and incarcerated. Situated at the nexus of intersecting marginalities, transgender inmates fare fa...

This article describes the official protocol and unexpected contingencies that motored data collection for a large scale study of transgender inmates in California prisons for men. The focus is on gender and sexuality as methodological confounds that, surprisingly and productively, ultimately served to shed insight into basic sociological questions...

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) increases opportunities for scholars to conduct research in carceral settings to determine the prevalence and contours of sexual assault. However, researchers face many challenges, including working cooperatively with state agencies while maintaining independence; gaining access to prisons and prisoners; secur...

For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to ident...

This review provides an overview of the emergence, content, and institutionalization of hate crime law as a unique form of criminal and civil rights law originating in the United States and increasingly finding a home in other countries. From the introduction and politicization of the term hate crime in the late 1970s to the increased enforcement o...

Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy. Edited by David S. Meyer, Valerie Jenness, and Helen Ingram. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 360p. $70.50 cloth, $23.50 paper. Most social scientists cling to a progressive image of history, in which one group after another organizes for various rights and int...

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...

This article examines the characteristics of law enforcement agencies and their environments that affect the process by which local organizations create and promote operational understandings of law for the purpose of managing enforcement behavior. Using data on law enforcement agencies in California, logistic and OLS regres- sion models reveal the...

We asked prosecutors how they think about hate crimes and which factors do and do not influence their decision-making processes when deciding whether to charge a hate crime (add a hate crime enhancement). Our empirical findings along these line provide the first glimpse of the dynamics that underlie the prosecution of hate crime.

Organizing scholarship both chronologically and thematically, this article provides a review and critical evaluation of the literature that examines factors influencing criminalization. The first part of the paper examines three streams of inquiry and theorizing: (a) classic work that has shaped decades of scholarship on criminalization by focusing...

Violence motivated by racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia weaves a tragic pattern throughout American history. Fueled by recent high-profile cases, hate crimes have achieved an unprecedented visibility. Only in the past twenty years, however, has this kind of violence-itself as old as humankind-been specifically categorized and labeled...

Nearly six years after two women were bound and gagged and had their throats slit while camping and hiking in Shenandoah National Park, U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft held a historic nationally televised press conferenceon April 11, 2002 to announce that the U.S. Justice Department invoked the federal hate crimes statute for the first time...

To comprehend the contemporary significance of hate crime, it is necessary to understand how the concept emerged and gained acceptance, as well as how its meaning has been transformed over time and across the institutional spheres of the American policy-making process-from social movements to legislatures to appellate courts and, finally, to law en...

Social Forces 79.3 (2001) 1208-1211 Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. By Philip Jenkins. Yale University Press, 1998. 302 pp. Cloth, $30.00. Despite its provocative title, this book is first and foremost an examination of how social facts, orthodoxies, and social control come into being and then get transformed...

Although it remains an empirical question whether the U.S. is experiencing greater levels of hate-motivated-conduct than in the past, it is beyond dispute that the concept of ‘hate crime’ has been institutionalized in social, political, and legal discourse in the U.S. From the introduction and politicization of the term hate crime in the late 1970s...

This work addresses a central question in both social problems theory and sociolegal studies: how can we understand and account for the content of legal categories that define social problems and attendant victims? It offers an empirical analysis of the emergence and evolution of federal hate crime laws-the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the Violence...

We view criminalization as a process of institutionalization that involves the diffusion of legal forms and practices. Conventional approaches to crimi- nalization have been dominated by historical case studies that illuminate the collective action and social structural bases of shifts in crime policy by fo- cusing on the dynamics internal to parti...

Violence born of hatred, bias, or prejudice has become the source of highly politicized public debate and subsequent mandates that "somebody do something." Accordingly, many federal, state, county, and city officials have taken measures to curb hate-motivated violence through new legislation. This criminalization of hate is a fairly recent developm...

This work offers an empirical analysis of 32 gay/lesbian sponsored anti-violence projects in the United States. The analytic focus is on how gay and lesbian communities have brought attention to the scape and consequences of anti-gay and lesbian violence in the United States, which ''has taken its place among such societal concerns as violence agai...

Gay and lesbian-sponsored antiviolence projects have used activist strategies and “collective action frames” similar to the contemporary women's movement's antiviolence against women campaigns and have defined violence against gays and lesbians as a social problem resulting from criminal sexual assault that stems from institutionalized sexual terro...

COYOTE (an acronym for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics”) is the central organization in the social movement to challenge traditional definitions of prostitution as a social problem. Using historical documents, this work focuses on COYOTE's campaign to sever prostitution from its historical association with sin, crime, and illicit sex, and place the...

A new time-division switching network and three processors enable No. 4 ESS to switch up to 550,000 calls an hour on 107,000 trunks, and to handle digital signals directly. The network switches calls by shifting pulse samplings of each call from one point in time to another - on one transmission path. (Most other switching systems use on transmissi...