Using survey data from a sample of white, black, and Hispanic incarcerated females (N = 554), we examine if the theoretically hypothesized and empirically demonstrated relationship between procedural justice and obligation to obey the law is substantiated among a sample of offenders and explore the impact that sharing the race/ethnicity of the defense attorney and prosecutor in their most recent conviction has on female inmates' perceptions of court procedural justice and their perceived obligation to obey the law. The findings reveal that female offenders who perceive the courts as more procedurally just report a significantly greater obligation to obey the law. In addition, white female inmates who had a white prosecutor were significantly more likely to perceive the courts as procedurally just. Non‐whites, though, perceive the courts as more fair if they encountered a minority prosecutor regardless of whether the prosecutor was black or Hispanic.
Scholars widely agree that the public is pragmatic about criminal justice. The empirical basis for this conclusion is the failure in several previous studies to find a sizable negative relationship between dispositional and situational crime attributions, or between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. We suggest, however, that public pragmatism may be an artifact of the use of unidirectional question batteries in prior research to measure attribution styles and policy support. When such questions are used, acquiescent responding can introduce systematic error that is positively correlated across items and scales. Drawing on data from an experiment with a national sample (N = 826) of Internet panelists, we examine how this methodological approach impacts the bivariate correlations and multivariate relationships between attribution styles and between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. The findings reveal that using unidirectional sets of questions to measure these concepts likely results in 1) inflated alpha reliability coefficients, 2) an underestimation of the magnitude of the negative relationships between attribution styles and between punitiveness and support for rehabilitation, and 3) an underestimation of the extent to which punitiveness and support for rehabilitation are driven by the same factors, working in opposite directions.
Serious offenders, especially incarcerated individuals, are rarely asked to judge the procedural justice of the police and courts. While serious offenders are rarely studied, even more uncommon are assessments of serious female offenders. In addition, despite a fair amount of research on perceptions of the procedural justice of the police and courts, little research has examined the spill-over of police effects onto the perceptions of the courts. This paper aims to bridge these gaps, by examining a sample of female inmates' perceptions of the police and courts, and the spill-over of perceptions of the police onto perceptions of the courts. Results indicate that female offenders' procedural justice perceptions are significantly influenced by their perceived honesty of police officers and the judge, and their perceived opportunity to have their voice heard in police and court encounters. There also appears to be a significant spill-over of police effects onto perceptions about the courts.
Fear of crime has been recognized as one of the driving forces underlying the punitive turn in the criminal justice system. Despite this, evidence suggests that rehabilitative efforts are still supported by the general public. The current study uses a national random sample to examine the impact of fear on public preference for allocating resources to rehabilitative versus punitive criminal justice system policies. Contrary to prior studies, respondents are forced to make a choice between punitive and rehabilitative options, and both the emotional and cognitive aspects of crime salience—fear of crime and victimization risk—are evaluated to determine their independent and combined impact on crime policy preference. The findings suggest that the majority of the public prefers putting resources toward rehabilitative crime polices, but fear of crime and risk of victimization both reduce this tendency. The implications of our results for current criminal justice system policies are discussed.
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