Justice Quarterly

Justice Quarterly

Published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences

Online ISSN: 1745-9109

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Print ISSN: 0741-8825

Disciplines: Criminal Justice

Journal websiteAuthor guidelines

Top-read articles

97 reads in the past 30 days

Public Perceptions of Gangs: An Experimental Test of Nomenclature, Race/Ethnicity, Violence, and Organization

July 2024

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364 Reads

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2 Citations

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This study examines how the public views gangs, surveying 1,000 US adults using a vignette of a teenage collective. Through a factorial design, elements crucial to gang definition debates were randomly manipulated: the name of the group, its racial composition, behavior severity, and organizational structure. Findings reveal that a name associated with known gangs significantly impacts perception, making it more likely for a group to be identified as a gang. The collective's activity and organizational structure also swayed perceptions, with violent and structured groups more readily classified as gangs. Surprisingly, the group's racial makeup did not markedly alter perceptions, although joint effects show it did affect the interpretation of other factors. These insights suggest a need to reassess how research shapes our understanding of gangs and, in turn, how public concerns inform policymakers; highlighting the nuances in public opinion that could factor into legal responsibility and guide future legislative decisions.

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32 reads in the past 30 days

Figure 1. Mediation Models and observed values. Note. For models estimating the effects of organizational culture and servant leadership on correctional officer mental health, solid lines are for depression, dotted lines are for anxiety, and bolded lines are for burnout. reported coefficients are unstandardized, with standard errors reported in parentheses. * = p ≤ .05; ** = p ≤ .01; *** = p ≤ .001.
Descriptive statistics, reliability indexes, and sample characteristics for wave i.
Ols regression models for leadership and correctional officer mental health.
Testing the Effects of a Servant Leadership Intervention Using a Cluster Randomized Experiment

January 2025

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32 Reads

Aims and scope


Publishes studies on issues related to criminal justice, crime, criminal behavior and the causes and consequences of crime.

  • Justice Quarterly ( JQ ) is an official publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
  • Justice Quarterly is a refereed, multi-disciplinary journal that publishes theoretical, empirical and interpretive studies of issues related to criminal justice, crime, and criminal behavior.
  • The primary focus is on articles that report original research (quantitative and qualitative) that make a unique and sizable contribution towards advancing the field in terms of theoretical understanding of the causes and consequences of crime, and the operation and evaluation of the criminal justice system.

For a full list of the subject areas this journal covers, please visit the journal website.

Recent articles


Figure 1. Data attrition in BWc meta-data and rMs data.
Figure 3. Number of matched rMs and BWc incidents by incident type with supplemented missing cases from rMs and BWc meta-data -overall category.
Missing data by officer assignment and incident type.
reliability of incident classification by assignment and incident type.
Mean time spent on incident (in minutes).
The Validity and Reliability of Body-Worn Camera Meta-Data and Its Utility for Understanding Policing
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2025

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10 Reads



Figure 1. Mediation Models and observed values. Note. For models estimating the effects of organizational culture and servant leadership on correctional officer mental health, solid lines are for depression, dotted lines are for anxiety, and bolded lines are for burnout. reported coefficients are unstandardized, with standard errors reported in parentheses. * = p ≤ .05; ** = p ≤ .01; *** = p ≤ .001.
Descriptive statistics, reliability indexes, and sample characteristics for wave i.
Ols regression models for leadership and correctional officer mental health.
Testing the Effects of a Servant Leadership Intervention Using a Cluster Randomized Experiment

January 2025

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32 Reads

Harmonious organizational cultures where staff experience positive mental health outcomes are largely created by managers who practice servant leadership. For many correctional officers, this leadership style is missing from corrections, leading to harmful institutional cultures, and depleted officer mental health. To determine whether correctional cultures and officer mental health can be improved, a servant leadership intervention was randomly assigned to one jail in Tennessee, while two other jails served as comparisons. Paired samples t-tests and linear regression models revealed how servant leadership improved officer beliefs about organizational culture, and decreased their symptoms of depression, anxiety, and burnout. Supplementary Sobel tests indicated how the effects of servant leadership on officer mental wellness were partially mediated by their culture perceptions. A cost-benefit analysis, coupled with a discussion of how important institutional cultures and officer wellness are to correctional operations, are offered to support the expansion of servant leadership throughout corrections.






Economic Inequality, Relative Deprivation, and Crime: An Individual-Level Examination

December 2024

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12 Reads

Previous research has shown that economic inequality is positively correlated with crime. In explaining this relationship, scholars have drawn on the theory of relative deprivation, which emphasizes individual-level processes of resentment resulting from being economically disadvantaged compared to others. However, this relationship has been examined almost entirely through macro-level analyses using aggregated data, despite an individual-level approach being more appropriate. The present study aims to address this limitation by examining the relationship between economic inequality and crime at the individual level, using the framework of relative deprivation. Applying Cox Proportional Hazard Model to official data over 10 years, we find that being relatively deprived compared to others increases the risk of committing both property and violent crimes. These results suggest that apart from the need to meet fundamental material needs, experiencing deprivation in comparison to others plays a role in shaping people’s criminal behavior.




Recorded Justice or Procedural Justice? A Randomized Controlled Experiment of the Influence of Body Worn Cameras and Officer Behavior on Citizen Attitudes

November 2024

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12 Reads

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1 Citation

We implement cluster randomization to test the impact of procedurally just and unjust police behavior during a hypothetical traffic stop (versus procedurally neutral behavior), in addition to the impact of BWC notification (versus BWC absence). The findings from post-vignette surveys administered to a random sample of 750 respondents indicate procedural justice has a pronounced effect on citizens’ perceptions of the officer’s behavior, their attitudes about the encounter, and their general views about police and the law within the context of the vignette. BWC neither improved nor worsened attitudes, nor did it buffer the impact of procedurally unjust policing or enhance the impact of procedurally just policing in the eyes of citizens. Tests of asymmetry indicate procedurally unjust police behavior results in more negative judgments of the officer’s behavior in the vignette than procedurally just behavior results in positive judgments. The results suggest that officer behavior matters much more than BWCs.







Figure 1. age-arrest distribution by type of offense across historical periods: Percentage age involvement (Pai). a legend: Note: averaged across multiple years to reduce instability because of random fluctuation (i.e. 1980 = average from 1979 to 1981; 2000= average from 1999 to 2001; 2019 = average from 2017 to 2019). a Pai is defined as percentage of arrests represented by each age after adjusting for age composition of the population, as based on 15-49 age range. b sum of arrests for aggravated assault and other assaults. c sum of arrests for burglary and larceny-theft. d sum of arrests for fraud, embezzlement, and forgery. e sum of arrests for public drunkenness, liquor law violations, and driving under influence. f sum of all arrests.
Figure 2. arrest rate by age group (15-19, 20-27, 28-34, 35-49) across decades: 1980-1990-2000-2010-2019. a legend: a each bar within each age grouping (from left to right) represents a single decade. averaged across multiple years to reduce instability because of random fluctuation (i.e. 1980 = average from 1979 to 1981; 1990 = average from 1989 to 1991; 2000= average from 1999 to 2001; 2010 = average from 2009 to 2011; 2019 = average from 2017 to 2019).
Figure B1. Predicted age-arrest distribution by offense type across historical periods: Observed rates, age Model, age-period (aP) Model, and age-period-cohort (aPc) Model.
Has Postponed Entry into Adult Roles Modified U.S. Age-Crime Curves? Age-Arrest Patterns of Teens, Emerging Adults and Adult Age Groups, 1980–2019

October 2024

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36 Reads

Social changes in industrialized societies have prolonged adolescence, postponing entry into adult roles. We use U.S. age-arrest data to investigate whether this delay has contributed to higher crime rates among emerging adults, altering population age-arrest curves. We compare parameters for multiple offenses from 1980 to 2019 to answer: (1) Have there been recent shifts toward older, less adolescent-spiked curves; (2) If so, do emerging adults today exhibit higher offending levels than historical counterparts; or (3) Do proximate age-groups drive these distributional alterations? We find peak age remains in the late teens, but today’s age-curves for minor offenses are more symmetrical compared to preceding adolescent-spiked iterations. Given contemporary emerging adults’ relatively low offending levels, more symmetrical age curves are the product of precipitous declines in teen arrest rates coupled with higher mid-life adult rates. Tracking future age-arrest trends is important, but data collection challenges related to the UCR-NIBRS transition may hinder those efforts.




Institutional Anomie Theory and Country-Level Public Corruption

October 2024

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43 Reads

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1 Citation

Public-sector corruption siphons trillions of dollars from the global economy and contributes to social instability. Institutional Anomie Theory, with its focus on the links between social institutions, individualistic and achievement-oriented cultural norms, and crime, offers a possible framework for understanding corruption. This possibility is contrasted with research indicating that individualistic values and free markets reduce corruption. Using twenty years of data from 83 countries, this study finds institutional imbalance toward the economy is associated with higher levels of corruption. The lowest levels of corruption are found in highly individualistic countries, though institutional imbalance had a strong positive effect on corruption in such countries. Conversely, corruption is high in collectivistic countries regardless of institutional imbalance. Findings underscore the importance of institutional and cultural configurations, and their interplay, for corruption. We discuss the implications of our study for Institutional Anomie Theory and directions for future research.


Validation of Short-Form Scales of Self-Control, Procedural Justice, and Moral Foundations

October 2024

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56 Reads

Self-control, perceived procedural justice, and moral foundations are prominent theoretical constructs in the criminological literature. However, existing measures of each are long. Long scales crowd questionnaires, increase cognitive burden, and lengthen completion times. Using a set of heuristic guidelines for scale construction , we develop short measures of self-control, procedural justice, and moral foundations and then test experimentally whether they can replace the existing longer versions. We conducted a series of split-ballot experiments with a national sample of American adults (N = 1191). Respondents were randomly assigned to receive the existing long scale or our shorter version. We then compared the scales on factor structure, reliability, and validity. The short scales performed as well, and sometimes better than, the longer versions. Our results suggest that researchers can use our short scales of self-control, procedural justice, and moral foundations in lieu of the existing long scales while maintaining data quality.






Journal metrics


2.6 (2023)

Journal Impact Factor™


14%

Acceptance rate


6.9 (2023)

CiteScore™


67 days

Submission to first decision


16 days

Acceptance to publication


2.080 (2023)

SNIP


1.248 (2023)

SJR