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

Introduction

1.1 People in Scotland can have contact with the justice system throughout their lives in a wide range of ways, from interacting with police on the street, to being called for jury duty, to going through divorce proceedings in a court. The justice system also features heavily in the media, both factually in news coverage, and fictionally in film and TV drama. It would be easy to assume, therefore, both that people know a lot about the justice system, and that people's attitudes to the justice system are easily accessible and well understood. This, however, is not the case.

1.2 This report explores the available research evidence on public attitudes to the justice system, focusing specifically on what drives people's attitudes, and what works to improve such attitudes. There are two principal reasons for focusing on this topic.

1.3 Firstly, despite the aforementioned high profile of the justice system, there are widely held misconceptions about what the public think and feel about the justice system and why. If these misconceptions are held by policymakers and politicians, there is a risk that this will skew public policy in regards to the justice system. That is, decision makers may make decisions based on incorrect information, which could work against intended policy outcomes.

1.4 Secondly, an accurate understanding of what people think of the justice system and why is the first step to taking effective action to improve the justice system in such a way that will lead to improved attitudes, experiences, and behaviour¹. This report will therefore also explore the evidence around what works best to improve public attitudes.

1.5 In particular, this review will provide an evidence base for the Scottish Government's justice change programmes, especially the Reassuring the Public Programme. This programme focuses on two outcomes - low levels of fear, alarm and distress, and high levels of public confidence in justice processes and institutions. This review will inform work around the latter outcome, and separate analytical projects will focus on the former. The review will also be informative for other current justice policy developments, such as the Making Justice Work programme and the creation of single Scottish police and fire services.

1.6 At this time of considerable financial strain for the public sector, it is vital that policy is based on sound research evidence to ensure that resources are invested in activities that are likely to bring about the desired outcomes, in this case high levels of public confidence, and also the national outcome of 'We live our lives safe from crime, disorder and danger'. To this end, this review focuses on four questions:

• What do we know about what public attitudes to the justice system are particularly in Scotland?
• What drives public attitudes to the justice system?
• What effect do public attitudes to the justice system have on people's behaviour, both in terms of co-operation with authorities, and law abiding behaviour?
• What activities have been demonstrated to improve public attitudes to the justice system?

1.7 The principal audience for this report are analysts, policymakers and practitioners in the area of justice. It is designed to be both a comprehensive and accessible account of a wide range of evidence which can be used to inform policy, practice and the design and direction of future research.

What do we mean by the justice system?

1.8 'The justice system' is a broad term which potentially takes in all the organisations, individuals and processes involved in monitoring and enforcing the rule of law. In practice, the vast majority of research studies reviewed for this report focus on the police, or the criminal courts (usually sentencing). This is at least in part due to the fact that these are the most visible aspects of the justice system to most people. Unfortunately, research into public attitudes to aspects of the civil justice system is close to non existent (see Moorhead et al 2008), so while it has been included in this review, it will not appear often in the findings outlined below² .

What do we mean by the public?

1.9 It is important to remember that 'the public' is not a cohesive group with uniform views and experiences (see Roberts & Hough 2005c; Feilzer 2007). Most research acknowledges this, and attempts to explore differences within populations, and explore reasons for these differences. Reflecting this, the aim of this review of research literature is to explore the range of attitudes held and the drivers behind these attitudes, rather than attempt to define what 'the public' as a whole think.

What do we mean by attitudes?

1.10 The word 'attitudes' in the title of this report is something of a catch all, as this report will review findings from studies which examine a range of types of attitude, such as confidence, trust, and support, which are each often defined differently from study to study. It is worth, however, taking some time to outline some general definitions at this point, to ensure clarity in the findings outlined below:

1.11 Attitude: 'an internal state that is 'expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour'' (Stalans, 2002: p.16). The key factor here is than an attitude by definition has an evaluative dimension.

1.12 Satisfaction: This term is most often used in relation to direct experience with the justice system, as in whether users of the system, such as victims of crime, are satisfied, i.e. happy or content, with various aspects of their experience (for example, victim of crime surveys carried out by police forces in England and Wales consist of a series of questions on satisfaction with aspects of the experience such as police response time, the way they were treated, and actions taken³ ).

1.13 Confidence: This is a more general kind of attitude, in that it is held by everyone, regardless of experience. There are various levels of confidence described in the social science literature. Some studies use 'confidence in the justice system' or 'confidence in the police' as a general measure of attitudes, whereas others use confidence more specifically, such as the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey which breaks confidence in the police down into confidence in local police force's ability to undertake specific aspects of their work such as 'ability to investigate incidents after they occur' and 'ability to solve crimes' (Scottish Government Social Research 2011). Roberts and Stalans (1997) describe confidence as a 'multidimensional concept' which includes confidence in all the different aspects of the functions of the police. Others have identified different levels of confidence which should be distinguished, such as:

'confidence in the integrity and fairness of the system, on the one hand, and confidence in its effectiveness, on the other. It is also useful to distinguish between someone's expectations that they personally will receive effective and fair treatment from the system, and their belief that overall the system is effective and fair.'

Roberts & Hough 2005c: 31

1.14 Others distinguish between confidence at the local level, and at the national level, and we will see that patterns in confidence ratings, and drivers of such, differ across these two levels (Hough & Roberts 2004).

1.15 Trust: Clearly trust and confidence are closely related concepts. Bradford et al (2009) usefully explain trust as something you 'do' and confidence as something you 'have'. They see confidence as an evaluation of how the justice system is performing, and trust as the personal relationship between a person and the system, related to specific experiences and behaviour (pages 142-143).

1.16 Support: Others still distinguish between different kinds of 'support' for the justice system or justice agencies such as the police (see Brown & Benedict 2002). Specific support focuses on particular agencies or people, whereas 'diffuse support' relates to an institution as a whole, such as 'the police' or 'the justice system', and does not necessarily relate to the performance of such institutions.

1.17 Legitimacy: A final type of attitude examined in the research literature is legitimacy, which is most often defined as the belief that an authority is entitled to make decisions and be obeyed (see Tyler 2010: 127). As such legitimacy is bound up with issues of compliance and consent. Some utilisations of the concept of legitimacy bundle together the perception that an authority is entitled to be obeyed with trust, confidence, or diffuse support. So, for example, in their study of the relevance of judicial independence to perceived legitimacy of the justice system, Buhlmann and Kunz use a survey question on confidence in the justice system as an indicator of perceived legitimacy, and trustworthiness (Buhlmann & Kunz 2011). Similarly, Murphy and Cherney describe the legitimacy questions in their survey of Australian residents thus:

The police legitimacy scale was constructed via five items. The measure was designed to assess feelings of respect and confidence in the police. In other words, the legitimacy scale was designed to measure the extent to which police are seen to have legitimate authority (e.g. I have confidence in the police)

Murphy & Cherney 2011: 240

1.18 This conflation of concepts has been challenged by the work of Gau, who found through extensive statistical analysis that 'obligation to obey' and 'trust' together did not in fact form a cohesive concept, legitimacy. She found instead that trust formed one facet of procedural justice, alongside quality of treatment and quality of decision making (see chapter 3).

1.19 We can see from the above discussion that the different kinds of attitude listed here are not synonymous. Evidence suggests that satisfaction with particular experiences contributes to trust, confidence and specific support, which in turn contributes to diffuse support for legal authorities and the belief that they are legitimate⁴ (see, for example, Myhill & Bradford 2012).

1.20 This report includes reference to research covering all of these kinds of attitudes, and more, as long as the reference point is some aspect of the justice system. The report will be as specific as possible when outlining findings as to which kind of attitude the study at hand was examining, so that any variance by attitude type or level is made clear.

1.21 This report will not, however, examine attitudes towards more general justice concepts, such as crime, fear of crime, feelings of safety and so on, except where these are identified in the literature as possible drivers of attitudes to the justice system.

Methodology

1.22 This report is the main output of a large scale literature review. This was not a systematic review, because the topic as defined was not specific enough to undertake a systematic review of evidence, but the review was nonetheless undertaken as systematically as possible.

1.23 A comprehensive list of search terms was drawn up, and used to search multiple online literature databases (see Appendix A for the search terms and databases used). Relevant citations (those to do with attitudes to the justice system) were transferred to a spreadsheet, and prioritised according to jurisdiction and relevance. The corresponding books and articles were sourced, beginning with Scottish and UK literature. The 458 entries in the spreadsheet were reprioritised as reading progressed, and 178 were read. Those left unread were studies focusing on non-UK jurisdictions which did not add to wider theory, and those which were not pieces of rigorous social research (i.e. thought pieces or those with flawed methodologies).

1.24 Studies which focused on the experiences of specific user groups such as victims, jury members, or offenders were included only where the study focused on the impact of such experiences on attitudes to the justice system or its constituent organisations. As the purpose of the review was to provide a broad account of the evidence on drivers of attitudes, the specific elements of the experiences of different user groups which do and do not lead to satisfaction were not included in this report, due to space constraints. It would be a worthwhile separate exercise to examine the specific factors related to satisfaction across the full range of justice system users.

1.25 Notes on the readings were coded by topic area, and this provided the structure for this report. References for the sources read can be found in the bibliography at the end of this report, and the full spreadsheet of references found in the literature search can be supplied on request.

Report Structure

1.26 The report will begin by examining patterns in public attitudes to the various parts of the justice system, both in Scotland and more widely. The main section of the report will seek to put these patterns into context by examining the evidence around what drives such attitudes. This section will examine the influence of socio-demographics, contact with the system, experience of local neighbourhoods and anti-social behaviour (ASB), knowledge about the justice system and crime, sentencing attitudes, media use, and wider social and political contexts. The section will conclude with a summary of the key drivers of people's attitudes to the justice system.

1.27 The third section of the report will examine the evidence around the link between people's attitudes to the justice system, and their behaviour, and the fourth and final section will look at the evidence on ways to improve public attitudes to the justice system.