In our last post, we looked at the effectiveness of procedural-fairness principles among adolescent offenders. This time we talk with someone researching another group of offenders—inmates in a women’s prison. Thomas Baker and his colleagues surveyed these women to determine the factors that lead to a greater sense of obligation to obey the law. For one, the researchers wanted to determine whether the relationship demonstrated in other studies between perceptions of fair treatment and willingness to obey the law would hold true for this group.
And it did. They found that female offenders who saw the courts as more procedurally just reported a significantly greater obligation to obey the law.
But this study also found a new factor that might be important—the racial similarity or difference between the offender and prosecuting attorneys. For white female inmates, those who had a white prosecutor were significantly more likely to perceive the courts as procedurally just. Nonwhite female inmates perceived the courts as more fair if they encountered a minority prosecutor, regardless of whether the prosecutor was black or Hispanic.
Baker discusses the study, Shared Race/Ethnicity, Court Procedural Justice, and Self-Regulating Beliefs: A Study of Female Offenders, in the following interview with Justine Greve, a staff member at the Kansas Court of Appeals. We hope you find these interviews enjoyable and informative.–Steve Leben
To download the files, just right-click the link, then click “Save target as.”
Procedural Fairness For Courts and Judges 
Leave a Reply