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In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments enacted guidelines to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Public defiance of these guidelines invoked instrumental concerns about the virus and normative concerns regarding government mandates and overreach during the pandemic. Drawing on normative and instrumental explanations for compliance with the law, the current study uses a national sample of 600 American adults surveyed during the beginning of the pandemic to examine defiance of these guidelines. Using structural equation modeling, we find that legal cynicism is positively associated with defiance, while fear and perceived severity of the coronavirus are negatively related to defiance. Findings suggest that fostering compliance with public health guidelines will involve reducing legal cynicism among the public.

The celerity tenet has traditionally been interpreted to suggest that a swift punishment is more effective than one that is delayed because it is more aversive, which should prompt individuals to p...

The governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic include concerns for both public health and formal social control. Government leaders asked the public to help mitigate the spread of the virus by adopting various protective behaviors. Our purpose was to evaluate and explain defiance of COVID-19 mitigation strategies, drawing from the expanded model of deterrence and protection motivation theory. A national sample of 600 American adults were surveyed about perceptions of, and behaviors during, the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, including defiance of COVID-19 mitigation strategies. Perceived severity of the disease, certainty about dying from it, and how much control one has over getting it each predicted fear of COVID-19. Defiance of COVID-19 mitigation guidelines appear to be a combination of rational choice considerations and emotions. Government and health officials should consider how the public evaluates messages about taking protective actions to maximize compliance.

Criminal justice researchers have focused on theoretical thresholds of work and their association with offending—such as “full-time” work among adults or “intense” work among adolescents. Despite the field’s reliance on these thresholds, there has been little empirical inquiry surrounding them. Using individual-level fixed effects and a sample of high-risk individuals, we evaluate age-graded heterogeneity in the relationship between hours of work and crime. Findings suggest that the association between hours of work and offending is negative and mostly linear among adults. However, the relationship is far more complex among adolescents, as it varies greatly by crime type and the specific number of hours worked. We discuss the practical implications of these findings with the suggestion that researchers and policy makers reconsider oversimplified work thresholds, as working more hours is not uniformly criminogenic among high-risk adolescents, whereas more hours worked is generally beneficial for young adults.

Though almost all convictions are the result of guilty pleas, little research has examined influences on defendant plea decisions. First, we explore how attorney satisfaction and court legitimacy a...

Objectives:To assess whether the relationship between legitimacy and police empowerment is sensitive to the operationalization of legitimacy, and whether the effects of legitimacy and its components on empowerment are invariant. Empowerment is examined in the context of police militarization—public support for the discretionary use of surplus military equipment by law enforcement.Method:Using a national sample of 702 American adults and a series of ordinary least squares regressions, the direct and interactive effects of legitimacy and its components on empowerment are examined.Results:The composite measure of legitimacy, as well as its individual components, each exert direct effects on police empowerment. Instrumental factors have persisting, albeit weaker, effects relative to normative factors. Interaction terms between the composite legitimacy measure or its components and sociodemographic characteristics were not statistically significant. In short, the effects of legitimacy and its components on empowerment appear invariant.Conclusions:Findings provide additional evidence of the generality of Tyler’s process–based model and extend these considerations to the burgeoning literature on public empowerment of police.

Objectives:This study evaluates the relationship between employment and crime through a holistic evaluation of both treatment and treatment effect heterogeneity.Methods:This study implements a perceptual measure of job quality (job satisfaction) and hybrid fixed effects models among a sample of high-risk adults. Analyses also consider the robustness of findings across alternative operationalizations of job quality and various sample subgroups.Results:Transitioning from not working to working in the lowest quality job can be criminogenic. Among those who are working, an improvement in job quality is not generally associated with offending. However, model and crime-specific effects are observed. Evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity is also found, suggesting the effect of job quality is moderated by race/ethnicity and location.Conclusions:These findings caution criminologists against making an assumption that employment is inversely related to offending and call into question our understanding of job quality as a general disincentive for crime. Rather, evidence suggests that improvements in job quality may result in modest reductions in offending, but only for certain types of crime and certain individuals within specific labor market contexts.

In this article, we examine citizens’ willingness to comply with Covid-19 prevention strategies of mandatory mask-wearing and recommended social distance/contact limitation measures from competing theoretical perspectives. These include self-control, deterrence, learning, social control theories, and fear of the infection. Data for the study come from 508 respondents from St. Petersburg—Russia’s second largest city—in May 2020, when the Covid-19 regional legislation that mandated citizens to wear masks in public went into effect. Overall, our findings suggest mixed support for various theoretical perspectives. Among the variables included in the analysis, fear of the infection is positively related to compliance with both mandated and recommended measures. Fear of Covid-19 infection, fear of punishment, and fear of disapproval on behalf of significant others that would follow non-compliance appear to be strong predictors of law-abiding behavior. Learning and self-control theories explain compliance with non-mandatory measures, but not with mask-wearing, which carried a penalty for violating the mandate.

Objectives Research has identified racial and ethnic disparities in rates of guilty pleas relative to trial where minorities are more likely to proceed to trial, though little research has explored the source of this disparity. Methods vUsing an adult nationwide sample and a vignette methodology, this research uses Ordinary Least Squares regression to explore differences in White, Black, and Hispanic defendants’ willingness to accept a guilty plea (WTAP). Results Though there are not significant direct effects of race or ethnicity on initial WTAP, there are racial/ethnic differences in theoretical antecedents of WTAP such as perceived probability of conviction, court legitimacy, and attorney type. However, there are not differences in the effects of theoretical antecedents on WTAP across race or ethnicity. Significant differences by race/ethnicity also emerge following a defense attorney's evaluation of an offer and are conditional on guilt. Conclusions Racial/ethnic differences in rates of plea acceptance are likely due to cumulative racial/ethnic differences in antecedents of WTAP, differences in the effect of attorney evaluation by race/ethnicity, and/or factors that were not directly examined in this study such as variation in plea offers. Implications for future research on the nexus between plea bargaining and race/ethnicity are discussed.

Extensive empirical support demonstrates the importance of legal (e.g., crime severity, prior record) and extralegal factors (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender) in predicting juvenile court outcomes. An understudied area is inquiry into how certain extralegal factors interact with legal determinants to impact the social control of juveniles. This study uses a sample of delinquent referrals from a Northeast state over 10 years to examine the impact of race/ethnicity, gender, crime severity, and prior record, individually and in combination, on juvenile court outcomes. Although the liberation hypothesis predicts that extralegal factors have a diminishing effect on case outcomes as the severity of the case increases, overall, we fail to find support for this expectation.

Empirical evidence suggests that the perceived certainty of apprehension is a far more effective deterrent than the severity of sanctioning. In concordance with this, many policing strategies have focused on increasing the certainty of apprehension as a key tactic in crime reduction. This chapter describes how recent advances in criminological understanding of perceived certainty are thought to influence offender decision-making. We then illustrate how these findings may inform policing and suggest potential avenues for collaborations between researchers and practitioners to further enhance understanding of offender decision-making and guide evidence-based policing.

Objectives:We examined the relationship between social preference game behavior and offender status and tested whether this relationship was attributed to genuine prosocial preferences or confounded by individual differences in future orientation, sensation seeking, and risk-taking.Methods:Offender and nonoffender samples played the dictator and ultimatum games. Ordered and generalized ordered logistic regression models were used to test the hypothesis that when compared to nonoffenders, offenders would demonstrate increased self-interest, while also considering competing theoretical mechanisms.Results:Offenders appeared to be more self-interested as indicated by smaller offers in the dictator game. This relationship, however, was attributed to differences in future orientation between the two groups rather than differences in social preferences. Net of demographic controls and competing theoretical mechanisms, however, offenders made smaller offers in the ultimatum game. We argue this finding revealed differences in strategic decision-making between the two groups.Conclusions:Results suggested that offenders were not distinguishable from nonoffenders by individual differences in social preferences. While nonoffenders made larger offers in both games, this finding was attributed to differences in temporal orientation and risk-taking rather than differences in prosocial preferences. This supported the rational choice assumption of self-interest and highlighted differences in strategic decision-making between offenders and nonoffenders.