The path to human rights in Romania: Emergent voice(s) of legal mobilization in prisons
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370820966575 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370820966575
European Journal of Criminology
2021, Vol. 18(1) 120 –139
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370820966575
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The path to human rights
in Romania: Emergent
voice(s) of legal mobilization
in prisons
Cristina Dâmboeanu
Valentina Pricopie
Institute of Sociology, Romania
Alina Thiemann
Sciences Po, France
Abstract
Starting from the premise that a better understanding of the legal efforts to implement
European norms regarding human rights in prisons cannot overlook prisoners’ subjective
experiences of rights, this article addresses the issue of prisoners’ complaints in Romania.
Using survey data on a sample of 557 prisoners, it first seeks to examine how often prisoners
lodge formal complaints and on what grounds, and how their complaints are framed. Second,
employing models drawn from the legal mobilization literature, it tries to identify which
are the individual and institutional determinants of prisoners’ complaints. Third, based on
a unique qualitative (content) analysis of the comments prisoners made at the end of the
survey, the article examines how prisoners articulate their discourse on rights’ claims. The
article concludes by pointing to the relevance of institutional status variables as determinants
of prisoners’ complaints and to the development of prisoners’ discourse embracing legal and
procedural languages.
Keywords
Human rights, human rights consciousness, legal mobilization, prisoners, Romania
Corresponding author:
Cristina Dâmboeanu, Institute of Sociology, Academy House, Calea 13 Septembrie, no. 13, Bucharest,
050711, Romania.
Email: cdamboeanu@gmail.com
966575EUC0010.1177/1477370820966575European Journal of CriminologyDâmboeanu et al.
research-article2020
Special Issue: Human rights, prisons and penal policies
Dâmboeanu et al. 121
Introduction
The topic of prisoners’ rights is surprisingly under-researched among EU states. Most of
the few existing studies examine the impact of European principles and regulations on
domestic prison policies (Cliquennois and Snacken, 2018; Van Zyl Smit and Snacken,
2009). Although this scholarship contributes to a better understanding of the legal
improvements in different states under the control of European monitoring and judicial
mechanisms, it tends to overlook the impact of these legal changes on prisoners’ experi-
ences of rights. The even fewer sociological and criminological studies focus mainly on
prisoners’ perceptions of living conditions and deprivations of rights (Drenkhahn et al.,
2014). How prisoners understand and articulate their rights; how they make use of the
grievance system and practise human rights; in short, how they come to develop human
rights consciousness and become litigants are under-investigated issues – a gap that this
article tries to fill.
Considering that a focus on prisoners’ subjective experiences of rights contributes to
the critical assessment of the legal efforts to implement the European norms regarding
human rights in prisons, this article investigates the issue of prisoners’ claims to human
rights in Romania. It first examines how often prisoners lodge formal complaints and on
what grounds, and how they frame their complaints. Second, employing models drawn
from the literature on legal mobilization, it identifies which individual and institutional
characteristics influence prisoners to make formal complaints. Third, it examines how
prisoners articulate their discourse on rights’ claims through the internalization of the
European terminology of human rights.
The article employs quantitative and qualitative analyses of data collected from a
survey of 557 prisoners. A qualitative analysis of the comments that prisoners made at
the end of the questionnaire complements the statistical methods used to identify the
determinants of prisoners’ claims. This approach has the capacity to ‘generate depth data
or “stories”’, allowing ‘respondents to write whatever they want in their own words, with
little structure imposed by the researcher’ (O’Cathain and Thomas, 2004: 25). Hence,
prisoners’ comments represent a useful set of data for analysing the structure of prison-
ers’ discourse about rights, including the style and the vocabulary used to describe the
complaints.
Focusing on what rights in prison mean to prisoners, the article goes beyond the
purely theoretical discussion of rights. As indicators of human rights consciousness, pris-
oners’ views and the dynamics of their rights claims are explored in a broader discussion
about power and resistance. According to Salle and Chantraine (2009), such an analysis
is the first step toward a systematic empirical enquiry to identify and explain the condi-
tions and the effective means for the law to enter the carceral realm and to produce
change because the claiming practice has the potential to transform the prison institution
and the way it functions. Therefore, our analysis of the dynamics of claims can provide
explanations of how prisons change to comply with the requirements of both a demo-
cratic society and the European recommendations.
Unlike previous studies conducted mostly in the US and Western Europe, the current
article focuses on Romania. This particular context can provide unique insights into
human rights in prisons, in general, and within the framework of the legal control of
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