Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

Holding parents responsible: Is vicarious responsibility the public's answer to juvenile crime?
Parental responsibility laws hold parents accountable for the delinquent behaviors of their children even when parents' actions are not the direct cause of an offense. Despite the prevalence of these laws, we know little about their perceived fairness. Is it reasonable to make parents vicariously responsible for outcomes they could not have foreseen and if so, under what circumstances? Our series of three studies addressed those questions by systematically examining the impact of various situational and dispositional factors on public opinions regarding parental responsibility. Respondents attributed most of the responsibility for a crime to the child, and attributions of responsibility to the parents varied as a function of the child's age. Case characteristics including the type of crime committed and the described parents' actions versus inactions did not consistently influence responsibility attributions. We conclude that people feel rather lukewarm about the notion of vicarious parental responsibility and this indifference may be related to issues surrounding the laws' enforcement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)
A person-oriented perspective on sexual offenders, offending trajectories, and risk of recidivism: A new challenge for policymakers, risk assessors, and actuarial prediction?
Current risk assessment tools are embedded in a variable-oriented perspective and based on the assumption that the risk of reoffending is linear, additive, and relatively stable over time. As a result, actuarial instruments tend to overestimate the risk of violent/sexual recidivism for some sex offenders while underestimating this risk for others. One of the main causes of such predictive inaccuracies is the inability of current actuarial tools to account for the dynamic aspects of offending trajectories over time. Using a person-oriented approach, the current study examined the presence of offending trajectories in sex offenders using measures of offending at multiple time points in adulthood to examine the risk of violent/sexual reoffending. The study was based on a sample of 246 adult males convicted of a sexual offense between 1994 and 1998. Group-based modeling was used to identify offending trajectories, while Cox proportional hazard was used to examine the links between the identified trajectories and recidivism. Findings suggest that a sex crime is more reflective of a transitory phase of the criminal career rather than evidence of a “sexual criminal career” in the making. The findings challenge underlying assumptions of current actuarial tools and calls for a more sophisticated approach to risk assessment that accounts for offending patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)
Stereotype threat in criminal interrogations: Why innocent Black suspects are at risk for confessing falsely.
Little theoretical attention has been paid to evidence that Blacks are overrepresented in samples of false confessors compared to Whites. One possible explanation is that innocent Black suspects experience stereotype threat in interrogations and that this threat causes Black suspects to experience more arousal, self-regulatory efforts, and cognitive load compared to White suspects. These psychological mechanisms could lead innocent Black suspects to display more nonverbal behaviors associated with deception and, ironically, increase the likelihood that police investigators perceive them as guilty. In response, investigators might engage in more coercive tactics and exert more pressure to confess on Black suspects than White suspects. This could increase the need to escape interrogation and the likelihood of doing so by confessing falsely more for Blacks than for Whites. I present these hypotheses within a social psychological framework, and discuss future directions for testing the model and theoretical and practical implications of such work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)
Procedural justice in contacts with the police: Testing a relational model of authority in a mixed methods study.
A relational model of authority (Tyler & Lind, 1992) emphasizes the role of procedural justice (the fairness of methods used to achieve outcomes) in public support for and evaluation of the police. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this study tested the model in the context of victim–police interactions. In-depth interviews were conducted with 110 people who had reported a crime (personal or property) to the police in the previous year. Quantitative findings supported the predictions that higher perceived antecedents of procedural justice would be associated with higher perceived legitimacy (obligation to obey the law), outcome fairness, and satisfaction with the contact. Antecedents of procedural justice were a stronger predictor of outcome fairness and satisfaction than the realization of a desired outcome, and a stronger predictor of legitimacy than criminal history. Qualitative findings supported these results. It appears that procedural justice has the potential for helping to motivate individuals with criminal history to obey the law. Implications for evaluation of police performance are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - Vol 17, Iss 4