Over the past year, we’ve been talking with authors of recent studies on procedural fairness, asking them to describe their research. Today, we have an interview with three researchers about three different projects, all on the topic of victims and procedural fairness.
Cortney Fisher, our first guest, has a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland. She talks about the research she did for her dissertation on victim satisfaction.
Our other two guests are Stacy Haynes (Associate Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University) and Alison Cares (Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Assumption College). Together, they have studied how victims and offenders perceive fairness and view the purpose of punishment. They also worked together on a literature review on restitution and the effect it has on victims’ feelings of satisfaction.
The researchers point out that all victims—regardless of demographic factors—are generally looking for the same things: information about the process, the chance to give input, and the sense that they’ve been heard by the court and the offender. They’re more interested in procedural justice than distributive justice. They do want to make sure that the offender doesn’t commit a crime again, but they aren’t necessarily more satisfied by seeing offenders get harsher sentences. They want to believe that the offender will be deterred from futures crimes for some reason other than being locked up.
Offenders, as it turns out, have some of the same desires. They tend to agree with victims on the purposes of punishment as well as whether the procedures and outcomes in their cases were fair. Offenders also benefit from having things like restitution explained to them and are more likely to pay if they realize that the money is going to the victim to help offset the damage they caused.
Restitution is an important part of helping victims feel restored, but even when victims don’t receive restitution, making sure they feel respected and heard can aid the restoration process. Since police officers and judges might not have much time to sit down with victims, the researchers encouraged more widespread use of victim advocates. A victim advocate can explain the process to victims and talk with them about their experiences, questions, and needs. Especially when victim advocates come from a community organization (rather than the prosecutor’s office or the court), they can independently represent victims and devote more time to them than a judge would be able to.
The researchers offer some practical tips for judges and tackle questions like how to consider input from victims while still making sure offenders receive equal justice.
We hope you find this interview useful and interesting. If you’d like to read more, the three studies the researchers discuss are cited below.
When researchers talk about police legitimacy, they’re usually talking about what the public thinks about the police. What makes people treat officers as authority figures? What makes people think the police will help them solve their problems? The subject of our latest interview, Justin Nix, turns the topic around to focus on what the police think.
Nix describes legitimacy as a dialogue between police and the public: the police make a claim to legitimacy, the public responds to that claim, officers adjust their behavior or views of themselves accordingly, and so on. In his dissertation and several recent articles, Nix picks apart that dialogue, looking for what police feel makes them legitimate in the eyes of the public and what influences how officers feel about themselves.
Nix says police officers know that procedural fairness is important to people, but they may not be as clear on its practical effects or whether it’s equally important to all groups. While they know procedural fairness bolsters their claim to legitimacy, for example, they don’t always see it as the best way to gain cooperation.
The next piece of the dialogue—how officers feel about their own legitimacy and react to public perceptions—is especially interesting in light of the scrutiny surrounding policing over the last two years. Negative portrayals of police do affect officers’ confidence in their authority, Nix says. That can make them not only more reluctant to do their jobs but also more likely to handle situations by using force. Nix says the negative publicity has made some officers less willing to partner with the community to solve problems. But he found that wasn’t the case for officers who viewed themselves and their agencies as legitimate and procedurally fair, demonstrating the importance of self-legitimacy for keeping up the dialogue between police and the public.
Listen to our interview with Nix below, or access the articles he discusses here. As usual, our interviewer is Justine Greve (M.A., American Studies), a staff member with the Kansas Court of Appeals.
This blog is full of suggestions for judges who want to be fair and to convey a sense of fairness in the courtroom. But what about judges who want to be wise? Will following tips on procedural fairness help them too? In our latest interview, psychology professor Heidi Levitt suggests that the road to wisdom runs right alongside the path of procedural fairness.
The interviews generated a long list of behaviors and attitudes associated with wise legal decision making—traits that will sound familiar to anyone who has read about procedural fairness. The judges emphasized giving litigants respect and voice, explaining court procedures, and expressing compassion for parties while still upholding the law. They valued curiosity, thoughtfulness, and flexibility to consider individual circumstances. They felt that it was important for judges to be engaged in each case—not only giving their full attention to the parties and the law but also recognizing and dealing with any emotions or bias that might arise.
Wise judges developed strategies for dealing with situations where their own values conflicted with the law or where they felt that the correct legal outcome was not necessarily the fair one. They tended to prefer rehabilitative sentences over punitive ones when possible. They also talked about the sense of isolation judges can feel and suggested seeking out the support and community of other judges.
Levitt and Dunnavant asked their subjects how judicial educators might promote wisdom in law school and beyond. The judges suggested placing more emphasis on pretrial problem solving, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and social justice. They felt that increasing the diversity of the judicial profession would be helpful as well.
As with the other podcast interviews on the Procedural Fairness Blog, this interview was done by Justine Greve (M.A., American Studies), a staff member at the Kansas Court of Appeals. Listen to her interview with Levitt (just click one of the links below) and think about your own experience. Are the wise judges you know also ones who strive to be procedurally fair?
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.
If you came across this title in our quarterly research report, The (Ir)relevance of Procedural Justice in the Pathways to Crime, the title alone might have surprised you. It surprised us too—so we decided to talk to the author for our second interview on recent procedural-justice research. As it turns out, the article doesn’t argue that procedural fairness isn’t important. In fact, as author Megan Bears Augustyn explained, procedural fairness is relevant to many offenders, and it is important for ethical reasons. But when it comes to increasing compliance and satisfaction, she says fair practices don’t have the same effect on everyone, at least in her study with adolescents.
Augustyn has researched adolescent behavior as well as procedural fairness, and she noticed that the effects of procedural fairness were not as strong among adolescents as among adults. She wondered if the results would break down differently for different types of adolescent offenders as well—those who start offending at an early age (usually driven by mental-health issues or problems at home) and those who don’t start offending until they are teenagers (often motivated by peer pressure).
Sure enough, Augustyn found that fair treatment didn’t have much of an effect on the early-onset offenders. Their reasons for offending were too complex to address by simply showing them respect and giving them voice. For the more limited adolescent offenders, however, fair treatment could affect attitudes and help curb illegal behavior.
Augustyn discusses this research and her conclusions in more detail in the interview linked below—available in both extended and edited versions. If you’d like to download the files, just right click the link, then click “Save target as.” Once again, the interview was done by Justine Greve (M.A., American Studies), a staff member with the Kansas Court of Appeals.—Steve Leben
We’re introducing a new feature of the Procedural Fairness Blog today. For new research on procedural fairness, we’ve already recommended our quarterly research reports. One of the authors of the quarterly reports, Justine Greve (M.A., American Studies), a staff member at the Kansas Court of Appeals, is going to put her past training in public radio to work for us by interviewing authors of some of the new research we think you’ll find of interest.
Her first interview (available in either an abridged or extended format) is with Kelly Frailing and Diana Carreon, who did an interesting study of a drug court in Laredo, Texas, where most of the population is Hispanic–and generally bilingual.
After watching judges and participants switch between Spanish and English at the Laredo drug court, Frailing and Carreon wanted to find out how being able to speak with the judge in Spanish influenced people’s perceptions of fairness in that court. They found that participants saw bilingualism as a positive feature of the court, even reporting that they felt the ability to communicate in Spanish was important to success in their case.
This may seem unsurprising in a community where the vast majority of the population is Hispanic: anyone would feel more comfortable speaking to a judge in his or her primary language. But almost all of these drug-court participants were bilingual from an early age, fluent in English as well as Spanish.
In the interview, Frailing and Carreon discuss their study and interpret their findings, suggesting that language in a court setting may mean more to people than just being able to understand and to be understood. Steve Leben
Procedural Fairness For Courts and Judges 