Procedural Justice, Posturing and Defiant Action: Exploring Prisoner Reactions to Prison Authority

Prison staff are vital for enforcing order in prisons. However, order is not only maintained by what prison staff do, but also relies on prisoners willingly following the directives of prison staff and complying with prison rules and procedures. This article puts forward the idea that how prison staff treat prisoners can affect the social distancing prisoners put between themselves and prison staff, potentially making defiance and non-compliance more difficult to manage. Social distancing is operationalised in this article as motivational posturing. Using survey responses from 177 Australian prisoners, the article shows a strong association between prisoners’ perceptions of procedural justice in prison and their self-reported compliance with prison rules. It also shows for the first time that motivational postures exist in a corrections context, and are associated with both procedural justice perceptions and self-reported compliance behaviour. Postures are also found to mediate the procedural justice/compliance relationship.