The Public and the Justice System: Attitudes, Drivers and Behaviour - A Literature Review

Footnotes

1. It is possible that improved attitudes to the justice system could lead to reduced fear of crime. This review, however, did not specifically examine fear of crime, as there is a large and separate body of literature on this which is not directly tied to attitudes to the justice system.
2. The Scottish Crime and Justice Survey does collect some quantitative data on civil justice, but in line with the survey's primary purpose to provide a victimisation survey that captures a measure of the prevalence of crime in Scotland, this focuses on experiences of those with civil justice problems, and not on general public attitudes. Likewise, the Scottish Court Service conduct a user survey, but again this is conducted only with people visiting courts, not the wider public, and by and large focuses on operational issues such as catering and other court building facilities.
3. See, for example, http://www.westmercia.police.uk/getinvolved/haveyoursay/victim-of-crime-survey.html
4. Chapter 3 will examine in more detail the drivers of satisfaction with an experience, and chapter 4 will look at the link between perceived legitimacy and people's cooperation and compliance behaviour.
5. Similarly, Myhill et al (2011) point out that a general issue with 'instrumental' survey questions about police performance can lead to a high proportion of neutral responses where people feel they do not have adequate personal experience to form a judgement (pages 120-121)
6. As with Scottish attitudes to the criminal justice system, data exists which would allow analysis of confidence by various geographic differences, but to date no such analysis has been published.
7. It should be borne in mind that there are issues of comparability when comparing countries with different justice system, and there are also possible limitations to the ICVS, which uses unrepresentative samples for some Latin American and Eastern European countries.
8. The questions contained in the SCJS are currently being revised, so this may change in future sweeps.
9. The SCJS collects demographic information, but analysis of attitudes by demographics has not, to date, been undertaken.
10. For more research on adversarial contact between young people and the police in Scotland, see the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime at http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/cls/esytc/
11. This chain is not always conceptualised in exactly the same way - for example some studies put satisfaction, confidence, and legitimacy in a different order, and some include trust. The link, however, from the perceived fairness of a specific experience up to more general positive attitudes, usually legitimacy, holds no matter how the intervening steps are conceptualised (see Gau 2011).
12. Panel data is when the same people are interviewed twice or more over a period of time, allowing examination of cause and effect, in this case especially where people have contact with the justice system between interviews.
13. For example see Brockner et al (1997).
14. The evidence in this section focuses on confidence in the police, not the courts. The one (Canadian) study that examined the impact of neighbourhood factors on confidence in the courts found the relationship to be not statistically significant (Sprott & Doob 2008: 354)
15. Unfortunately we do not know how bad respondents thought crime was two years ago, so for example 'about the same' could mean something very different for someone who thought there was a lot of crime in their area than for someone who thought there was no crime.
16. The 'what works' section below will examine the issues around the implementation of this information provision, here we will focus on the link between having 'accurate' factual information and attitudes.
17. Deliberative workshops involve both the giving of information, usually in the form of presentations, and then participant discussion about the information and issues raised. See Hough & Park 2002 and Green 2006.