Procedural justice, legitimacy, and prisoner misconduct

Abstract

Using structured interview data and official records from an incarcerated sample of adult males housed in a Slovene prison, this study tests hypotheses derived from the process-based model of regulation (Tyler, in M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice, pp. 283–357, 2003). The findings show that inmates who evaluate prison officers’ use of authority as procedurally just are less likely to report engaging in misconduct and are charged with violating fewer institutional rules. The observed association between procedural justice and legitimacy is indistinguishable from zero. Although legitimacy is inversely related to both prisoner misconduct measures, the associations are relatively weak. Overall, these findings partially support Tyler's social–psychological framework, and also provide empirical justification for fair and respectful offender management.

Keywords:

• procedural justice
• legitimacy
• prisons
• prisoner misconduct
• Slovenia

Notes

1. See Meško and Bučar-Ručman (2005) for a review of violence research conducted in Slovenia.

2. Available research suggests that community policing reforms have been stymied by organizational factors, political concerns, and a lack of police legitimacy in the eyes of the general public (Meško & Klemenčič, 2007; Meško & Lobnikar, 2005).

3. Nine participants did not respond to one or more survey items, resulting in 15 missing scores. Put differently, approximately 0.5% of the total scores in the data file were missing. PRELIS substitutes a missing value for a specific case with a value from another case with a highly similar response pattern (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1996). When compared to alternative methods of handling missing data (e.g. listwise deletion and mean replacement), research has supported the use of similar response pattern imputation (Gmel, 2001; Myrtveit, Stensrud, & Olsson, 2001).

4. Population data do not include prisoners housed in the highest security department.

5. Prisoner misconduct is conceptually defined as an act of commission or omission that violates formal prison rules and for which a sanction is prescribed. This definition is consistent with recent calls for more expansive definitions of prison disorder that include a host of illegitimate activities, not just inmate acts that threaten the safety of other prisoners (Mears & Reisig, 2006).

6. A 6-month recall period was used to help ensure that participants would report that they had engaged in at least some misconduct and minimize bias due to memory decay (see Junger-Tas & Marshall, 1999).

7. Note that one of the 103 inmates who participated in the prisoner survey was released during the 7-month observation period, so the analysis of official misconduct includes 102 inmates.

8. Various steps were taken to reduce social desirability bias (e.g. informing participants that prison officials would not have access to individual responses, encouraging participants to provide honest responses to survey items, and interviewers making a concerted effort to build rapport with participants). Nevertheless, we cannot be entirely certain that some participants did not report evaluative judgements and attitudes regarding prison officials that they felt were socially desirable.

9. Previous research has demonstrated that unconventional inmate attitudes are not a uniquely American phenomenon (Akers, Hayner, & Gruninger, 1977; Kaminski, 2003; Reisig & Lee, 2000).

10. The survey instrument did not contain items that would allow us to determine prisoners’ ethnicity or national origin.

11. Diagnostic statistics confirm that this is indeed the case. Specifically, the tolerance estimates exceed 0.50 (Menard, 1995), and the variance inflation factor scores are all below 2 (Kennedy, 1992).

12. Using established criteria (Green, 1991; Harris, 1975), the samples in Table 5 are sufficiently large to use multivariate regression techniques to detect medium effect sizes.