Perceptions of Criminal Justice
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Perceptions of Criminal Justice

Vicky De Mesmaecker

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eBook - ePub

Perceptions of Criminal Justice

Vicky De Mesmaecker

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About This Book

In recent decades, research into the legitimacy of criminal justice has convincingly demonstrated the importance of procedural justice to citizens' sense of trust and confidence in legal authorities and their resulting willingness to conform to the law and cooperate with the legal authorities. Reversing the age-old question 'why do people break the law?', theories of procedural justice have provided insight into the factors that encourage people to abide by the law, suggesting that experiences of procedural fairness are crucial to achieving compliance with the law and to enhancing the legitimacy of criminal justice.

While these studies are important in showing that legal authorities need to pay attention to the fairness judgements of the people involved in legal procedures, the focus on showing the importance of procedural justice has had the ironic consequence of distracting researchers from studying the equally important question of what fairness means to the people involved in legal proceedings.

In one of the first studies on procedural justice to use a qualitative research design, the author provides the reader with detailed and insightful descriptions of the elements that determine how victims and defendants assess the fairness of their contact with the police and the courts. Focusing on both the pre-trial and the post-trial phases, this book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of the psychology of law, procedural justice and the legitimacy of criminal justice.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2014
ISBN
9781134618682

Part I

Setting the stage

1 Introduction

Improving understanding of the lay meaning of procedural justice
In important respects we are on the cusp of a shift from a post-to a pre-crime society, a society in which the possibility of forestalling risks competes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done. In consequence, the post-crime orientation of criminal justice is increasingly overshadowed by the pre-crime logic of security.
(Zedner, 2007: 262)
After increasing sharply in the four decades before 2000, and culminating after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, fear of crime has become a prominent issue on political agendas worldwide (Simon, 2007). Scholars report a shift from a post-crime society to a so-called pre-crime society, where popular discourse and political agendas are increasingly oriented towards surveillance, crime prevention and ‘the pursuit of security’ (Zedner, 2007: 262) and individual life choices such as where (not) to live, travel or send one’s children to school are made to a large degree on the basis of the perceived risk of crime (Simon, 2007). Risk calculation has become a central feature of daily life as traditional crime control models have been exposed as inadequate to the goal of crime prevention and policy-making in domains not directly related to crime – such as health, education and the environment – increasingly focuses on issues of safety too (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1999).
Mainstream academic discourse has it that in this ‘new securitized environment’ (Simon, 2007: 7) the responsibility for security and risk management, in particular in the domain of criminal law, is no longer solely in the hands of governments (Garland, 2001; Simon, 2007; Zedner, 2007). In reply to the privatisation tendencies that emerged as part of the neo-liberalist philosophy that has come to dominate societies in recent decades, individuals and communities are called upon to do their part of the ‘crime prevention job’. While the quest for security leads individual communities to take private initiatives, such as setting up a neighbourhood watch system, and leads families to take measures to protect their homes and belongings, private security service suppliers conquer the market of security services.
While these privatisation tendencies are incontestable, a second, equally important shift in approaches to crime prevention has taken place recently. This second development concerns an evolution with respect to the particular state actors that are considered responsible for maintaining societal security. The continuous emphasis on the importance of increasing the costs of crime in order to prevent people from committing crime has led to the conventional notion that legislators bear the responsibility for crime prevention, yet in recent decades research has pointed out the role of law enforcement agencies in crime prevention.

Beyond privatisation: new perspectives on the role of law enforcers

In the past, a getting tough on crime approach governed efforts to discourage crime. The belief in the capacity of punishment to deter crime put the responsibility for crime prevention in the hands of legislators who, through legislative acts, were expected to increase the threat of punishment. Nowadays, the role of law enforcers – particularly the police – in crime prevention and regulation is increasingly emphasised (Tyler, 2007; Meares, 2013; Tyler and Jackson, 2013). The rise of stop-and-frisk policies in some of the major cities of the United States – New York, Chicago and Baltimore to name just a few – is one of the most visible illustrations of the contemporary view that the police too have a role to play in crime prevention. Originating in Wilson and Kelling’s (1982) Broken Windows theory (Collins, 2007; Fagan et al., 2009), aggressive and profound stop-and-frisk tactics have been advanced as the prime manner in which the police can contribute to the prevention of disorder. Yet these stop-and-frisk policies, Collins (2007: 420) argues, have led to the development of ‘bad blood’ between the police and ‘large segments of the communities they seek to serve’ (see also Hough, 2013 and more broadly on the negative effects of aggressive crime control approaches Howell, 2009 and Tyler and Jackson, 2013). Stop-and-frisk policies seem antithetical to the development of good relationships between the police and the community because of the selective enforcement of these policies, with systemic racial disparity in the implementation of stop-and-frisk policies being the principal problem (Geller and Fagan, 2010; Fagan et al., 2012).
Research on institutional legitimacy advances another, more helpful approach to the role of law enforcers in crime prevention. This line of research suggests that in order for citizens to voluntarily defer to the law, they need to believe that the law and those enforcing it are just. To the degree that they do, they will feel personally obligated to defer to the legal authorities and to the laws that these authorities are enforcing (Tyler, 2006a). The legitimacy of criminal justice and citizen willingness to conform to the law, then, do not primarily depend on governmental effort to raise the costs of crime or increase the risk of getting caught but on the perceived legitimacy of those enforcing the law (Tyler, 2007, 2009a). It is the manner in which the police and the courts perform their duties and behave towards citizens that determines people’s willingness to comply with the law (Tyler, 1990, 2003). As such, these authorities have an important responsibility in the prevention of law-violating behaviour. Tyler has taken this argument to proclaim that everyday encounters with the police and courts are ‘socialising experience[s] that build or undermine legitimacy’ (2013: 17). The adoption of community policing and neighbourhood policing as models of policing as from the 1980s attests to law enforcers’ present awareness of the importance of good police–citizen relationships to police legitimacy (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997; National Research Council, 2004; Tuffin et al., 2006; Tyler, 2007; Quinton and Morris, 2008; Myhill and Quinton, 2010). As it turns out, people with a more positive perception of law enforcers have more positive perceptions of the law in general, which in turn promotes compliance (Papachristos et al., 2012) – both compliance with particular decisions of legal authorities and general, everyday compliance with the law (Tyler, 2007).
The crucial feature of law enforcers’ behaviour that determines citizen perceptions of these actors and, consequently, citizens’ inclination to live by the law and defer to law enforcers, is the degree to which these officials perform their jobs in a procedurally just manner (Tyler and Huo, 2002; Tyler, 2007, 2009b). Social psychological research on citizens’ sense of trust in the police and the courts demonstrates that people judge the behaviour, actions and decisions of law enforcement agencies against the criterion of procedural fairness. Procedural fairness refers to the quality of the interpersonal contact between citizens and the law-enforcing authorities, the quality of the information that citizens are supplied with, the chances that they are given for offering the authorities their own point of view on the matter and the objectivity and neutrality of the law-enforcing agencies. These aspects of procedures determine citizens’ perceptions of the procedural fairness of their contact with the police or judicial authorities (Tyler, 1989; Tyler and Lind, 1992; Malsch, 2009). Together these factors – which will be elaborated upon more extensively below – constitute the basis for legitimacy-based compliance. By respecting these factors, law enforcers can lead citizens to be more willing to defer to their requests, accept their authority and live by the law in their everyday life. Importantly, the fair exercise of authority also makes citizens more likely to cooperate in crime fighting. Citizens who experience procedural fairness become more willing to assist the police in their job of crime fighters by, for example, informing the police when they witness a crime, helping the police to find a suspect or reporting suspicious activity (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003), which may contribute to reducing crime rates too (Meares, 2013). There are, then, two ways in which procedurally fair law enforcing advances the goal of crime prevention.

Procedural justice in contemporary criminological discourse

Procedural justice theory is grounded in a Benthamian view on justice, i.e. the view that whether or not justice is done is decided upon by those on the receiving end of justice, not by those who are supposed to ‘do’ justice (Burns and Hart, 1970; Rosen, 1993; Young, 1994). It is no coincidence, then, that procedural justice has become a much-pursued area of research in the last decades. The model’s focus on the relation between the state as represented by criminal justice authorities and individual citizens has been much welcomed by the relational models of justice that made their way into the criminological mainstream during much the same time period. Foregoing the traditional rational choice perspective on humans that provides the basis of Western criminal justice systems (Norrie, 1996), relational models of justice press for replacing traditional trial and punishment practices with a justice process that is ‘shared’ (Norrie, 2000). The very nature of the idea of alternative dispute resolution, for example, as described by Resnik (2013), is that ‘from policing, prosecution, and punishment to civil litigation, ideas about what various government officials do have been built, reformatted, and are now under revision again. Whether it was ever credible to talk as though the state monopolises the functions of maintaining order, enforcing criminal law, and imposing civil liabilities, it is not so today’ (187). Relational approaches to justice, examples of which are ‘alternative dispute resolution’, ‘neighbourhood justice’, ‘community justice’ and ‘restorative justice’ (Pavlich, 2005), look for ways to deal with conflict that include repairing the harm caused by the conflict and the relationships that were breached with a strong focus on participatory approaches and involving communities (Schluter, 1994). They have in common the conviction that people involved in a conflict caused by, for example, a crime, a neighbourhood dispute or a school fight should have the opportunity to actively participate in the resolution of the conflict. Keywords of relational approaches to justice are ‘collaborative’, ‘inclusive’, ‘engagement’, ‘participation’, ‘mutual agreement’ and ‘meeting’ (Zehr, 2002: 25–6). Interventions based on restorative justice principles, for...

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