Date of Award

8-16-2024

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Criminology and Criminal Justice

First Advisor

Christie Metcalfe

Abstract

Knowing why people stop offending over time and the criminal justice agencies' role in this process is essential for designing effective crime control interventions. Legal authorities have the core function of ensuring that social norms and laws are obeyed. However, the coercive and punitive tactics that police, judicial, and penal authorities typically resort to have been shown to have only limited impact on controlling and preventing crime while having the unintended consequence of worsening the public's perception of their institutional legitimacy. Specific to policing, the use of coercive policing tactics and their perceived ineffectiveness has, in recent decades, led to a police legitimacy crisis while also raising questions about the role of police in society.

This project builds on research linking procedural justice and perceptions of police legitimacy to both self and social identification changes and research linking procedural justice and police legitimacy attitudes to voluntary compliance and suspending offending. This research aims to investigate and provide an account of how the police can more effectively reduce offending by identifying potential pathways through which police procedural justice and legitimacy attitudes influence obedience and reduce re-offending.

To this end, this study explores the interrelationships between police procedural justice, police legitimacy, identification, compliance, and offending in three manuscripts. Using OLS regression models, the first manuscript is a cross-sectional analysis of the association between legal identification and normative compliance among a general population sample. This study also investigates whether feelings of identifying with the law mediates the relationship between procedural justice, police legitimacy, and normative compliance. Relying on random effects regression models, the second manuscript takes a longitudinal approach in investigating within-individual changes in procedural justice, police legitimacy, and different types of self-identification over time among an offender sample. The final manuscript draws upon this same sample and utilizes cross-lagged structural equation models to investigate whether police procedural justice and police legitimacy at an earlier time point impact self-reported offending at a later time point through self-identification.

Results show that, among the general public, greater legal identification correlates with increased willingness to comply with the police voluntarily. Mediation analyses also show that feelings of identifying with the law mediate the association between police procedural justice, legitimacy, and normative compliance. Turning to the longitudinal offender sample, results of random effects models also show that within-individual increases in procedural justice and police legitimacy are related to decreases in moral disengagement and assessments of the personal rewards of crime, two measures of identity. However, results of cross-lagged path models did not show that procedural justice and police legitimacy at an earlier time point effect self-reported offending at a later time point, and there was not evidence of an indirect effect through identification. These findings confirm that police procedural justice, police legitimacy, identification, compliance, and the suspension of offending are interrelated; however, there is a need for further assessments of the temporal nature of the relationships.

Rights

© 2024, Qassim Bolaji

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