Introduction to the special issue on cross-cultural issues in psychology, crime and the law

The journal, Psychology, Crime and Law, was established exactly 30 years ago (Shaw et al., 2013). The motivation for the new journal was to help cultivate and showcase the work of then European-based scholars who researched and practiced at the intersection of Psychology and Law. The journal has since accumulated 30 volumes and hundreds of articles, becoming an internationally recognised and respected venue for high quality scholarship. This legacy continues with another milestone – Psychology, Crime and Law’s inaugural special issue on Cross-cultural issues. Special issues highlight a growing area of importance that transcends specialty areas across the broader field. Prior special issues have considered a range of topics including neuroscience, treatment programmes for high-risk individuals, personality disorder, aggression and intellectual disability. Cross-cultural issues, the focus of the journal’s fourteenth special issue, impacts all aspects of psycho-legal research policy and practice, including the topics featured in prior special issues. Indeed, culture, race and ethnicity are critical concepts that can impact decision making within psycho-legal contexts. Identifying the unique barriers, needs and experiences of diverse populations when accessing medico-legal systems is an important exercise in social justice. Particularly given the over-representation of minoritized populations in criminal justice systems around the world, and the flow-on impacts this has for their communities. As such, it is useful for researchers and practitioners alike to consider cross-cultural issues within their various sub-disciplines to improve our understandings and promote better justice outcomes for diverse populations.

While matters of race and culture had not been the subject of prior special issues, numerous individual papers on such topics have featured in the journal over the past three decades. A scan of the journal’s 30 volumes uncovers manuscripts considering jury-decision making and race of defendant, race and false confessions, risk factors across ethnicity, racial bias in parole decisions, the cross-cultural validity of risk assessment instruments, and inter-racial police/civilian encounters, to name a few. The most recent special issue, published almost five years ago, Understanding Crime: A Multi-Level Perspective, encompassed papers on rehabilitation with a cross-cultural lens (Day et al., 2019). The current special issue covers some of this territory, as well as new areas of enquiry, and contemporary ideas, trends and reflections. It is one of the larger special issues which is an indication of the number of high quality manuscripts submitted for consideration and the level of importance the journal’s consumers afford to this area.

The opening four articles of the special issue consider police-citizen interactions. Burke and colleagues’ paper, ‘Evaluating a model program for improving law enforcement officers’ perceptions of and interactions with youth in a diverse urban setting’, evaluates the impact of law enforcement training designed to improve interactions with young people of colour in Philadelphia. Authors Williamson and Murphy then analyse data from over 500 Australian Muslim participants in their paper ‘Perceived deservingness of procedurally (un)just treatment: experimental evidence of minority perceptions of vicarious police-citizen interactions’. The authors explore participant assessments of police-citizen encounters and a Muslim citizen’s deservingness of procedurally just/unjust police treatment. Ewanation and Maeder explore mock jury decision making in trials involving police use of force. Their paper ‘Let’s (not) talk about race: comparing mock jurors’ verdicts and deliberation content in a case of lethal police use of force with a White or Indigenous victim’, investigate the role of victim race and pre-existing attitudes on jurors’ individual pre- and post-deliberation verdicts. The fourth paper ‘Before and after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: citizen perceptions of a “Reasonable Officer”’, explores community perceptions of subject-officer interactions. McClure and colleagues consider the impact of race, subject aggression, force escalation and participant familiarity with the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cases.

The next two papers feature court related studies. In ‘Punitive consequences of being a minority male: an analysis exploring intersectionality, racial/ethnic threat, and sentencing outcomes’, Okafor examines sentencing data between 2010 and 2017 from the State of Florida. The study explores sentencing outcomes across race, with consideration to neighbourhood demographics. Roberts and Maeder then consider the effects of defendant gender and racialisation on Canadian mock jurors’ verdicts in a case of parent-perpetrated child neglect in their manuscript ‘The intersection of defendant gender and racialisation in a case of child neglect’. The next group of papers examines the impact of culture on different forms of legal testimony. In ‘Culture, trauma, and memory in investigative interviews’, Vredeveldt and colleagues, consider how culture and negative life events may interact to influence memory reporting in investigative interviews. De Bruine and colleagues then investigate the intersection of memory and culture in statements made during the asylum seeker determination process in their paper ‘Culture and credibility: the assessment of asylum seekers’ statements’. The third paper, from Hope and colleagues is entitled ‘Exploring cultural differences in eyewitness accounts using a self-administered reporting technique’. The paper examines differences in memory reporting across two sub-groups, those from Lebanon and those from the United Kingdom.

The next group of papers explores mental health across various contexts followed by two risk assessment studies. In ‘Mental health screens used in U.S. corrections settings: evidence of fairness with Black and Latinx people’, Eno Louden and colleagues examine the tools’ criterion validity across racial, ethnic and cultural subgroups within the corrections system. Adair et al. then qualitatively examine factors associated with criminal behaviour for 72 women living in the U.S.–México border region. Further, Zhang and colleagues explore the characteristics of individuals who had experienced an injury through legal intervention in their paper ‘Risk and contextual factors associated with legal intervention injury and hospital outcomes among trauma patients in Pennsylvania’. The first risk assessment paper in the special issue is entitled ‘Addressing racial bias in parole decisions: A pre-registered study of the Five-Level Risk and Needs System of risk communication’. Here, Aelick and colleagues evaluate the ability of the 5-levels risk communication system to attenuate racial biases. Ahmed and Maaike Helmus then consider the cross-cultural predictive accuracy of two widely employed sexual offending risk instruments, in their paper ‘Comparing Indian and White men charged or convicted of sexual offences on the Static-99R and STABLE-2007’.

Rounding out the special issue are two papers; ‘A simulation study on the utility of the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms-Second Edition (SIRS-2) in Taiwan Region adults’, by Tam and colleagues, and ‘Workplace cyberbullying toward the Arab minority in Israel: gender differences in attitudes and attribution of blame’ by authors Maor and Rozmann.

As evidenced by the above selection of manuscripts, a growing number of researchers are devoting their scholarship to issues of culture, ethnicity and race in psycho-legal settings. The diverse collection of papers in this special issue demonstrates this effort, which we hope will enable a more nuanced and critical understanding of the experiences of multi-cultural clients and the systems that serve them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).