Procedural justice and legitimacy of the law in the criminal justice system: a longitudinal study among Dutch detainees

ABSTRACT

Procedural justice theory suggests that when authorities in the criminal justice system treat people fairly and respectfully, people will be more likely to view the law and its representing authorities as legitimate. Previous research has largely focused on the association between the procedurally just treatment by a single authority and citizens’ legitimacy beliefs. Up until now, it is unknown whether and how multiple criminal justice authorities can encourage individuals’ legitimacy beliefs by treating them in a procedurally just manner. Using longitudinal data from the Prison Project, this study examines how procedural justice perceptions experienced during interactions with the police, prison staff, and the judge influence Dutch detainees’ legitimacy beliefs about the law. The findings reveal that distinct authorities can strengthen the legitimacy of the law by treating detainees fairly and respectfully. Additionally, our findings shed some light on the process associated with procedural justice and legitimacy throughout the entire criminal justice system.

KEYWORDS:

• Procedural justice
• criminal justice authorities
• legitimacy
• detainees
• police

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Participants of this study did not consent to have their data shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Notes

1 The fact that a substantial group had already been released at T2 means that there was no wave of data collection in detention, in which all participants were sentenced (and thus were detained in post-trial detention). At T2, the majority of the persons (95%) who were still detained and who participated were held in pre-trial detention.

2 Scholars often measured legitimacy by assessing people’s (i) trust in authorities, (ii) felt obligation to obey and (iii) views about normative justifiability of power (moral alignment). The latter subconstruct was not available in our data. Therefore, we operationalized legitimacy as a two-dimensional construct using trust in authorities and felt obligation to obey.

3 To further examine the factor structures of procedural justice and legitimacy of the law, confirmatory factor analyses were performed at T1 (police procedural justice, prison staff procedural justice, obligation to obey) and T3 (judge procedural justice & obligation to obey). Measurement models did allow all latent variables to be freely correlated. Because the outcomes (indicators) are ordinal, we used a mean and variance adjusted weighted least squares (WLSMV) estimator available in Mplus for model estimation (Beauducel & Herzberg, 2006; Muthén & Muthén, 2017). Although the chi-square goodness-of-fit test failed to indicate model fit (T1: χ² = 1,687.708, df = 347, p < .001; T3: χ² = 624.481, df = 118, p < .001), other fit indicators showed a good fit of the measurement model (Comparative fit index [CFI] = .983 & .972; Tucker-Lewis index [TLI] = .981 & .968; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = .047 & .058) (Byrne, 2012). Moreover, all items loaded significantly on each latent variable (loadings exceeded .5). In conclusion, this supports the construct validity of procedural justice and legitimacy of the law (analyses can be requested).

4 The summated scale was created if at least 83% of the items had a valid value (5 out of 6).

5 The Cronbach’s Alpha has a variety of well-known issues (Cortina, 1993; Green et al., 1977; Hattie, 1985). For instance, even though the coefficients demonstrate the coherence within scales, they do not reveal dimensionality of scales. Moreover, the coefficient increases as the number of items forming the scale increases. Even though we acknowledge these issues, we reported the Cronbach’s Alpha in line with existing research.

6 Procedural justice scales were created when detainees had a valid value on at least 8 out of 11 items (73%).

7 There was a modest correlation between antisocial tendency and low self-control (r = .55).

8 Given the purpose in this study, the semi-partial correlation should be preferred to the standardized b coefficients (Pearson’s r), because the latter just indicates the linear relationship between X and Y and does not take into account the unique variance explained by a specific independent variable (Field, 2013).

9 In these analyses, a mean centered score was used to avoid problems with multicollinearity in moderation analyses.

10 Of the 1748 detainees participating in the questionnaire of the Prison Project three weeks after arrival in pre-trial detention (T1), 1355 detainees were included in our initial sample because they had valid scores on all variables (393 detainees were excluded). We used listwise deletion to handle missing data, but this may have introduced biases into parameter estimation (Allison, 2001; Sterne et al., 2009). To check the robustness of our findings, additional analyses were conducted using multiple imputation with chained equations (25 iterations were performed) (White et al., 2011). The results remained substantively the same both in terms of significant effects and effect sizes (available upon request).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Open Competition grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant number: 406.18.RB.011).