Valerie Jenness to Present at the Walter C. Reckless-Simon Dinitz Memorial Lecture

    IRVINE, CA, April 6, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The Ohio State University Criminal Justice Research Center and the OSU Journal of Criminal Law will be hosting their 28th Annual Walter C. Reckless-Simon Dinitz Memorial Lecture on April 7th, 2017. The lecture is held every year in honor of two outstanding Ohio State criminologists, Walter C. Reckless and Simon Dinitz. This year's guest speaker is Dr. Valerie Jenness who will be speaking on "I Just Want What is Fair: Prisoners, Justice and Legitimacy".

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, their satisfaction with dispute outcomes, and their attributions of legitimacy. There is, however, one glaring gap in the literature. In this era of mass incarceration, studies of the attitudes of the incarcerated are strikingly rare. This presentation addresses this gap by drawing on unique quantitative and qualitative data to unpack the complicated nature of perceptions of fairness and justice in the prison context. The presentation will discuss how the data was obtained:

1) face-to-face interviews with a random sample of men incarcerated in three California prisons; 2) a random sample of officially processed California prisoner grievances; and 3) official data provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Jenness will argue that the precedence of actual outcomes in these prisoner's perceptions of fairness and in their dispute satisfaction is grounded in, among other things, the high stakes of the prison context, an argument that is confirmed by our data.

Dr. Valerie Jenness is an author, researcher, public policy advisor, and professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Jenness is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and prior to that, was a Senior Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Jenness served as Dean of the School of Social Ecology from 2009 to 2015 and Chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society from 2001-2006. Jenness is credited with conducting the first systemic study of transgender women in men's prisons.

Contact:
Valerie Jenness
http://www.valeriejenness.com

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