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The current study assesses the impact of the movement that followed George Floyd’s murder on early adolescent attitudes toward the police (ATP). Using a repeated cross-sectional design, we examine ATP among a Midwestern sample of 5th and 6th grade students before (fall 2018 and fall 2019) and after (fall 2020) Floyd’s murder. Descriptive results reveal that the distributions of ATP were identical during fall 2018 and fall 2019 survey years but shifted during the fall 2020 survey year. Results from mixed effects linear regression models indicate that Black and White girls experienced the largest declines in ATP from fall 2019 to fall 2020. Boys, particularly White boys, were less impacted. While Black boys’ average attitudes did not change in the post-Floyd era, overall, their attitudes were significantly lower than other groups. The findings highlight the need for ongoing measurement of early adolescent perceptions of law enforcement during the post-Floyd era and the current legitimacy crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractLegal cynicism refers to a general contempt of people toward the law and legal authorities. Gifford and Reisig proposed a scale to measure the construct and provided evidence for its multidimensional nature. As an extension of the research on this scale, this study provides answers to two questions relevant for applied empirical research. Should empirical studies of legal cynicism treat its subdimensions as distinct yet interrelated constructs with separate scale scores, or is it adequate to consider the scale unidimensional and use an overall scale score? Are the measurement properties of legal cynicism invariant across socio-demographic characteristics relevant to criminological research? Analyses of data from two German studies (sample 1, n = 342, 54.4% male, mean age 32.7; sample 2, n = 334, 49.40% male, mean age 46.07) revealed that the scale is not sufficiently unidimensional and that the measurement properties are invariant across age, gender, and educational status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has offered an important starting point for understanding the legal socialization process, known as one’s ever changing orientation about the legal system. However, little is known about the extent to which family members influence adolescents’ legal socialization. Using the year 15 (wave 6) survey data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study dataset (N = 2,749), the current paper explores the association between parental and sibling police contact and legal cynicism as one dimension in the legal socialization process. This study examines how the family experience of a police stop may be an overlooked mechanism in the transmission of perceptions about the law. Results suggest that teens’ own experiences are important, and sibling police contact strengthens this effect, warranting further exploration of family in legal socialization research. We highlight the potential role of police contact as a symbiotic harm – one that flows between familial relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal socialization is the process by which individuals develop values, attitudes, and behaviors related to the law and legal authorities. Legal socialization also includes beliefs about procedural justice, police legitimacy, and legal cynicism. To date, few studies have examined the legal socialization processes of transgender women, a worrisome omission given high rates of police contact, arrest, harassment, and violence among transgender women, particularly transgender women of color. This study examines transgender women's experiences with and perceptions about the police, including experiences of procedural injustice and how they impact police legitimacy and cynicism, among a racially diverse sample of transgender women living in Chicago. Participants described undergoing a secondary legal socialization process after beginning to transition. The study also documented strategies transgender women use to prevent police contact and arrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, using a sample of youth offenders from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 1354), examines Greenberger and Sorensen's model of "psychosocial maturity" as a predictor of legal socialization (legal cynicism and legitimacy) across the adolescent developmental course, as well as the differential importance of this relationship by age. Psychosocial maturity significantly predicted lower levels of legal cynicism, but also lower levels of legitimacy, from ages 14–25. Yet, when considering the salience of these relationships by age, results suggest that the relationship between psychosocial maturity and legitimacy may show little variation as adolescent offenders age, but that the salience of psychosocial maturity on explaining patterns of legal cynicism declines with age during development into emerging adulthood. This work's potential implications for promising interventions that foster psychosocial maturity in early adolescence to reduce legal cynicism of youth who have offended or are at high-risk of offending are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescents with positive attitudes towards the legal authorities are unlikely to adopt delinquent behaviours. To examine the role school can play in shaping such attitudes, we questioned 465 middle school students to assess how their emotional relationships with teachers (teachers' compassionate love, teachers' esteem) relate to their attitudes towards authority (trust in the justice system, positive evaluation of the law). We also assessed whether these associations were mediated by school belonging. Results showed that teachers' compassionate love and teachers' esteem were (respectively) directly and indirectly linked to students' attitudes towards authority. In both cases, school belonging acted as either a partial or a total mediator. This is consistent with the group engagement model and suggests that students' attitudes towards legal authorities are linked to their affective relationships with teachers, partly because their positive perceptions of teacher-student relationships strengthen their feelings of school membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police-initiated diversion practices allow officers to divert youth away from the justice system. This qualitative study addresses one such Southern California program to understand the subjective experiences of youth and parents through in-depth interviews. Thirty-eight respondents, 19 youth and 19 parents, were interviewed for this study. Results demonstrate how an increase in positive interactions with police officers and diversion program staff can influence how youth comply with the law and legal institutions. Interviews emphasized youths' complex attitudes toward police and the law, highlighting the importance for police and diversion programs to engage in transparent practices to facilitate a greater understanding of diversion and reduce potentially traumatic feelings from initial police contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular model of legal socialization contends that interactions with authority figures impact the internalization of pro-social values and beliefs, including authority legitimacy. Simultaneously, subcultural theories, including the code of the street, emphasize that negative contextual and experiential factors promote subcultural beliefs. The current study examines whether legal socialization processes are associated with the development of subcultural beliefs. Using longitudinal data from approximately 1,200 adolescent male offenders, we examined whether social experiences and contextual characteristics influence the development of individual beliefs in the code of the street through police legitimacy and legal cynicism. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the effects of deleterious neighborhood characteristics and negative interactions with authority figures were associated with beliefs in the code of the street through diminished police legitimacy and higher levels of cynicism toward the law. These findings provide evidence of the relevance of legal socialization processes for the development of subcultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite surging interest in legal socialization, it is unclear how youth develop legal cynicism. The present study examined two socialization mechanisms for youth legal cynicism: perceptions of police treatment and maternal legal cynicism. Additionally, we assessed the degree to which an adolescent's legal cynicism predicts reoffending. Youth and their mothers (338 dyads, total N = 676) were interviewed following their son's first arrest. Path modeling tracked the associations between youths' perceptions of police treatment, youths' and mothers' legal cynicism, and youth reoffending. Results suggest that youths' legal cynicism derives from their own perceived treatment by police and not from mothers' legal cynicism. Additionally, youth who perceived the police to have treated them more fairly reported less legal cynicism and in turn reoffended less. Findings advance our understanding of the etiology of legal cynicism and can inform best practices for police interactions with youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal socialization conceptualizes two processes for attaining compliance as either consensus-based or coercive-based. However, in real life, an adolescent's exposure to police and school authorities is likely to incorporate a blend of both the consensual and coercive systems of compliance. In this article, we examine how harmonizing the way that police and school authorities engage with young people using a consensus-based legal socialization approach might influence a young person's self-reported antisocial behavior. Drawing data from a randomized field trial of the Ability School Engagement Program in Brisbane, Australia, we find that a young person's participation in the consensus-based program impacts self-reported antisocial behavior over time indirectly through changes in perceptions of police legitimacy, but not through changes in perceptions of school legitimacy. We conclude that young people are more likely to obey the law when they are exposed to harmonized legal socialization experiences, but it is a young person's view of police that matters more for compliance with the law than how they view school authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research examining the legal socialisation process continues to be largely focused on US adolescents, calling into question the generalisability of this work. This study tests a popular model of legal socialisation – the procedural justice model – using a sample of youth in São Paulo, Brazil. Approximately, 750 12-year-olds completed a survey assessing their direct and vicarious contact with police, judgements of police procedural justice, crime perceptions, police legitimacy, legal cynicism, and criminal offending. Both direct and indirect experiences with the police were associated with lower procedural justice. Police legitimacy was associated with both procedural justice and crime perceptions; however, legal cynicism was only associated with perceptions of crime. Finally, higher perceptions of police legitimacy, but not legal cynicism, were associated with lower levels of self-reported offending. Overall, this study showed mixed support for the generalisability of the procedural justice model of legal socialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal socialization researchers have ignored the role of emotions such as guilt to explain rule-violating behavior (RVB). The purpose of Study 1 was to determine if anticipated guilt or guilt proneness was a better predictor of RVB. Participants were 325 university students who completed an online questionnaire. Correlations indicated that both measures were related significantly to RVB; however, when both were entered into a multiple regression as predictors, only anticipated guilt was significant. This suggested that anticipated guilt was a stronger predictor of RVB than guilt proneness. The purpose of Study 2 was to investigate the effects of anticipated guilt on future RVB while controlling for the integrated legal socialization variables. Participants were 283 middle school and 187 high school students. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to predict students' future engagement in RVB. Anticipated guilt predicted RVB for middle school and high school students. However, sex moderated these effects. Male students low in anticipated guilt committed more RVBs than male students high in guilt. Female high school students showed a similar effect but not at the same magnitude as the male students. Guilt had no significant effect on RVB for female middle school students. Implications for the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The experience of court watching, an extended period of supervised direct observation in the courtroom, can aid students in the processs of legal socialization, conceptualized as the capacity for critical reflection, expertise in deliberation, and sound judgment about profoundly divisive issues in the American legal system. It takes advantage of the strong contemporary interest in crime and justice and counteracts the distoring effects of television legal entertainment on students' knowledge of and attitudes toward the legal system. The author reports on a court-watching class and offers suggestions for court watching use across the curriculum [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study was to compare the relative influence of social learning versus cognitive developmental factors as predictors of legal reasoning. The sample included 87 men and 132 women who lived in four residence halls. The two experimental residence halls included one in which residents ran their own judicial system and one in which the residence hall staff strictly enforced the rules. Participants reported responses on the following legal reasoning measures: the normative status that a particular behavior had for each individual, the enforcement status (the individual's willingness to accept enforcement of a rule against that behavior), and the frequency of rule-violating behaviors. The results provided stronger support for a cognitive developmental rather than a social learning explanation of normative status and enforcement status of rule-violating behaviors. Because this simple finding could mask a full explanation of legal socialization as suggested by some cognitive developmental theorists, we introduced the interaction between these two factors into the analysis. The interaction was significantly correlated with the frequency of engaging in disorderly behavior, the normative status of destructive behavior, and the enforcement status of all rule-violating behaviors. The implications of the interaction for future theory is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]