Legal Cynicism, Antisocial Attitudes, and Recidivism: Implications for a Procedurally Just Community Corrections

ABSTRACT

The current approach to supervising offenders in the community has produced disappointing results in terms of reduced recidivism. In response to this, a number of scholars have turned their attention to the role that community corrections officers (CCOs) may play in ensuring successful community supervision. Early evaluations of CCO training have shown promising results, yet missing from this knowledge is a consideration for the legal cynicism that may be held by offenders. It may be unreasonable to expect CCOs to change the antisocial attitudes of offenders when those negative attitudes are directed toward them. The purpose of the current work, therefore, is to integrate ideas about legal cynicism into the knowledge about effective supervision to promote a more procedurally just community corrections. Our broader purpose is to encourage a more realistic understanding of the challenges of the officer-offender relationship in order to improve the efficacy of existing models of effective community supervision practice.

KEYWORDS:

• community corrections
• prisoner reentry
• procedural justice
• recidivism
• reintegration

Notes

1. A particularly compelling example provided by Werth (2012) is of a female parolee with previous convictions for credit card fraud. One of her special conditions was that she could not possess a bank account, which impeded her ability to become financially self-sufficient.

2. Other notable antisocial attitude scales include the Pride in Delinquency Scale (Shields & Whitehall, 1991), the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) (Walters, 1995), and the Texas Christian University Criminal Thinking Scale (TCU CTS) (Knight, Garner, Simpson, Morey, & Flynn, 2006). Each scale shares its connection to legal cynicism. The Pride in Delinquency Scale is a 10-item measure that was developed to supplement the original Criminal Sentiments Scale (CSS). It assesses an individual’s pride or shame in committing specific criminal behaviors. PICTS was designed to capture thinking styles regarding serious criminal conduct. There are 10 subscales and 80 items in the PICTS: (Mollification, Cutoff, Entitlement, Power Orientation, Sentimentality, Superoptimism, Cognitive Indolence, Discontinuity, Current, Historical). The TCU CTS contains 6 dimensions that include Entitlement, Personal Irresponsibility, Justification, Power Orientation, Coldheartedness, and Criminal Rationalization (Knight et al., 2006, pp. 163–164). Criminal Rationalization includes items such as “Bankers, lawyers, and politicians get away with breaking the law every day” and “This country’s justice system was designed to treat everyone equally,” which notably resemble legal cynicism.

3. Kroner and Mills (1998) create a two-factor solution using the CSS items “contempt for criminal justice personnel” and “disrespect for conventional law.” The former domain was not related to future criminal behavior and the authors suggest that it may not represent a criminogenic need. Simourd and Olver (2002) break down the respect for criminal justice system subscale into two components: general criminal sentiments (primarily composed of items of negative sentiments toward authority) and adversarial law beliefs. In contrast to Kroner and Mills (1998), they found that the former construct was indeed associated with a number of future criminal behavior measures.

4. We focus primarily on EPICS given the amount of recent empirical attention to the model as well as its applicability to legal cynicism, procedural justice, and recidivism. Other supervision models that discuss the officer-client relationship include STICS (Bonta et al., 2011), Strategies Aimed at Reducing Rearrest (STARR) (Robinson et al., 2012), and Proactive Community Supervision (PCS) (Sachwald, 2000). For a broader understanding of these and other programs and their relationship with offender outcomes see Chadwick, DeWolf, and Serin (2015) and Trotter (2013).

5. It is important to acknowledge that the individuals who work with the DRI-R (and others who write about the dual-role relationships exhibited by CCOs more broadly) do situate their research within the procedural justice literature (see especially Manchak, Kennealy, & Skeem, 2014). Thus, they represent an important foundation to build upon by also incorporating ideas about legal cynicism—specifically as it pertains to offenders as well as the antisocial attitude assessment tools that describe them—into evidence-based community corrections.

6. Although beyond the scope of the current analysis, it is possible that legal cynicism may represent a specific responsivity factor. Specific responsivity factors are personal characteristics that may affect the offender’s amenability to treatment and thus far they have received far less scholarly attention as compared to general responsivity factors (e.g., treatment should be based on social learning approaches (Hubbard, 1999)). This inattention is unfortunate given that the evidence-based corrections movement seeks to determine what works best for which offenders. Existing works typically identify broad characteristics of offenders as specific responsivity factors such as intelligence and interpersonal skills. Our review of the literature suggests that the legal cynicism held by offenders may represent both an antisocial attitude and a specific responsivity factor. This suggestion is speculative, and future empirical analyses could determine whether legal cynicism best fits within the “N” or the second “R” of the RNR model.