From procedural legitimacy to the prevention of ill-treatment: evidence on how procedural justice and external inspections reduce abuse in the prison context

Abstract

Preventing ill-treatment in prisons is a legal and, crucially, organizational challenge: abuse often persists not only due to individual misconduct but also because of opaque routines, chronic stress, adversarial occupational cultures, and weak accountability. This theoretical-analytical article, grounded in a narrative review and document analysis, argues that sustained reductions in ill-treatment require integrating two complementary axes. The first is procedural legitimacy—procedural justice applied to day-to-day authority—expressed through neutrality, respect, voice, and trustworthiness, which can reduce conflict, increase cooperation, and lower reliance on coercion. The second involves external inspections and independent monitoring, understood as transparency, deterrence, and corrective mechanisms that reduce “impunity zones” and drive improvements in protocols, records, and organizational culture. Building on these axes, the article proposes a preventive governance model combining legitimate authority at the interpersonal level, risk-oriented internal controls, protected complaint channels, and external inspections with follow-up capacity. The central conclusion is that preventing ill-treatment is not a normative add-on but a governance requirement: more legitimate and more supervised prisons tend to operate with less violence, fewer crises, and higher operational predictability.