Reassessing the relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy.

OBJECTIVE: A large body of cross-sectional research has identified a positive relationship between perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy. Following Tyler's theoretical framework, studies have often interpreted the observed relationship as evidence of an unequivocal causal connection from procedural justice to legitimacy. Here we reexamined the validity of this conclusion by considering the temporal order of that association and the potential biasing effect of time-invariant third common causes. HYPOTHESES: (a) Past perceptions of police procedural justice would predict future perceptions of legitimacy; (b) Past perceptions of police legitimacy would predict future perceptions of procedural justice; and (c) Perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy would be associated as a result of 3rd common causes. METHOD: We fitted random intercepts cross-lagged panel models to 7 waves of a longitudinal sample of 1,354 young offenders (M = 16 years) from the "Pathways to Desistance" study. This allowed us to explore the directional paths between perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy, while controlling for time-invariant participant heterogeneity. RESULTS: We did not find evidence of the assumed temporal association; lagged within-participant perceptions of procedural justice rarely predicted within-participant perceptions of legitimacy. We did not find evidence of a reciprocal relationship either. Instead, we detected substantial time-invariant participant heterogeneity, and evidence of legitimacy perceptions being self-reproduced. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings challenge the internal validity of the commonly reported positive associations between procedural justice and legitimacy reported in studies using cross-sectional data. Most of such association is explained away after considering time-invariant participant heterogeneity and previous perceptions of legitimacy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Exploring the origin of sentencing disparities in the Crown Court: Using text mining techniques to differentiate between court and judge disparities.

Research on sentence consistency in England and Wales has focused on disparities between courts, with differences between judges generally ignored. This is largely due to the limitations in official data. Using text mining techniques from Crown Court sentence records available online we generate a sample of 7,212 violent and sexual offences where both court and judge are captured. Multilevel time-to-event analyses of sentence length demonstrate that most disparities originate at the judge, not the court-level. Two important implications follow: i) the extent of sentencing consistency in England and Wales has been underestimated; and ii) the importance attributed to the location in which sentences are passed - in England and Wales and elsewhere - needs to be revisited. Further analysis of the judge level disparities identifies judicial rotation across courts as a practice conducive of sentence consistency, which suggests that sentencing guidelines could be complemented with other, less intrusive, changes in judicial practice to promote consistency.