An appeal to the higher courts by a convicted defendant is the major mechanism for the oversight and regulation of prosecutorial misconduct. In this way, appellate courts play an essential role in ensuring the fairness of criminal trials and in addressing misconduct by legal actors. Upon finding that the prosecutor erred, appellate courts conduct a harm analysis to assess the likely impact of the misconduct on the fairness of the trial and its outcome. Before this step, however, appellate judges must first evaluate the defendant’s claim(s) of prosecutorial misconduct and either concede that it occurred or reject the defendant’s assertions as unfounded. In this study, we examine each of the 93 appeals reviewed by New York’s higher courts in 2021 in which appellants alleged one or more types of prosecutorial misconduct. Using multilevel logit modeling to estimate appellate court concessions of misconduct, we find higher odds of concession when the alleged prosecutorial misconduct occurred at trial than when it occurred in pretrial proceedings. Little else affects whether higher courts concede defendants’ claims. This suggests that, apart from trial stage, the courts are not selectively conceding official misconduct in ways that allow them to declare the misconduct harmless.

The Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE) reflect one of, if not the most, comprehensive examinations of family group conferences (FGC) to date. Various studies have used these data to highlight challenges, obstacles, and unintended consequences of restorative justice (RJ) processes. The purpose of this review is to systematically analyze issues associated with RJ as revealed by RISE that have implications for the implementation of RJ in general. We review how RISE data have been used to empirically evaluate the underlying processes and outcomes of RJ according to justice processes, shaming, and shame management; RJ's effectiveness in terms of recidivism and reparation; and factors that condition this effectiveness, such as characteristics of offenders, crime type, and gender. We end with a discussion of suggestions for addressing these challenges in the future.

OBJECTIVE:Although studied to a lesser extent than traditional bullying, the literature on cyberbullying highlights the negative effects that this form of bullying can produce among its victims. However, it is unclear whether the immediate and long-term effects of cyberbullying differ, especially when longitudinal data on this form of bullying is lacking. METHOD:Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey's 2011 and 2013 School Crime Supplement, we examine the negative effects of cyberbullying on various school outcomes during the immediate school year and after 2 years have passed. RESULTS:We find that the initial and prolonged effects of cyberbullying differ with most negative consequences occurring in the short term rather than the long term. CONCLUSION:These findings indicate the need for early identification of cyberbullying and intervention by teachers and adults, whose support can reduce antisocial behavior and prevent short-term and prolonged negative outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

General Strain Theory argues that strain affects the experience of negative emotions and the likelihood of deviant coping. However, negative affective states and deviant coping can still emerge even when individuals fail to acknowledge or recognize the import of adversity. Using data from the Reintegrative Shaming Experiments, we compare the effects of strain observed by others and strain that is perceived by the individual on anger and projected offending. We find that offender perceptions of negative treatment predict anger while observed strain does not. Although observed and perceived strain increase projected offending, anger mediates the latter relationship.

Although scholars have theoretically addressed how information from others can affect justice processes, little empirical research investigates how individuals make sense of a distributive injustice when also attending to other justice and legitimacy concerns. This research examines how legitimacy conditions emotional and behavioral responses to various forms of injustice associated with strain. Drawing from General Strain Theory (GST) and the social psychological literature on legitimacy and justice, I investigate how endorsement of a deviant response to injustice, while failing to support the perpetrator of injustice, influences negative affect and projected deviant coping in response to a distributively unjust blocked goal. A randomized vignette survey was distributed to a sample of undergraduates. Results reveal that legitimacy affects perceptions of justice and conditions the effect of unjust strain on negative affect and the likelihood of deviance, but only when certain types of injustice are present.

Although studies have linked judicial intervention to inmate outcomes, it is unclear how the various reasons for which an institution is under court order predict the likelihood of inmate misbehavior, such as violence and other nonviolent forms of rule breaking. Data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities (SISCF) and the 2000 Census of State Correctional Facilities (CSCF) are used to examine how various prison violations affect inmate misconduct. Hierarchical linear models reveal that sweeping litigation and reforms that pose a greater challenge to correctional authority are associated with greater misconduct, while more targeted approaches appear to have a less pronounced or inverse association with misconduct. These findings have important implications for the operation of the correctional institution and its society of captives.

Appellate courts sometimes provide relief in cases where prosecutors engage in certain actions, either free from scrutiny during investigation (backstage) or under judicial oversight during litigation (front-stage), that go beyond their authority and the law. Yet little is known about how the nature and types of prosecutorial misconduct recognized by appellate courts systematically affect their decisions to provide relief. Using data from the Center for Prosecutor Integrity, we analyze 150 appellate court cases between 2010 and 2015 in which prosecutorial misconduct is substantiated by the courts. We find that higher courts are more likely to correct for cases involving multiple types of misconduct and for cases in which the misconduct occurs "backstage," outside of judicial oversight, rather than during litigation.

The socio-historical concept of criminal responsibility links the action (actus reus) and mental state (mens rea), or intention, of the actor (i.e., the defendant) to determine legal and moral liability for his or her behavior and to apportion punishment. When the actor responsible for immoral conduct is the prosecutor in pursuit of a conviction, the courts respond very differently. More specifically, because prosecutors are presumed to be moral and ethical system actors, assumptions about their good character likely influence the ways in which they are held to account. This study explores the content and arguments made by appellate judges in their review of prosecutorial misconduct when the higher courts concede that misconduct occurred at trial. Borrowing a systems theory framework, we evaluate how Texas appellate courts responded to prosecutorial misconduct in 35 criminal convictions considered on appeal between 2010 and 2015. Systematic content analyses of the courts’ opinions demonstrate that closed systems, like the American legal system, both diffuse responsibility for misconduct across other criminal justice actors and prioritize procedural elements above substantively just outcomes. This latter approach is inconsistent with how other systems—civil society, scholars outside of the legal arena, and the media—interpret their decisions. In this way, the misconduct of prosecutors is rendered opaque, and a tenuous confidence in the process of criminal prosecution is maintained.

Research indicates that, in comparison to traditional court processing, restorative justice enhances victim satisfaction. This is in part due to the opportunities for dialogue within the restorative approach that enables offender accountability and victim reparation. Yet, some crimes that occur may not involve a direct victim, which would have implications for whether victims are present and levels of restoration and reparation within restorative justice. Using data from the Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), we examine how crime type affects restorative justice outcomes. We find that conferences involving victimless crimes enhance offender accountability and community reparation in comparison to other crimes.

This special issue of the International Journal on Responsibility (IJR) advances scholarship on the various ways responsibility infuses the roles of criminal justice agents. As the inaugural issue of my tenure as Editor-in-Chief, Volume 6 deepens our understanding of responsibility in the context of the criminal justice system, thereby fulfilling IJR’s aim and scope. Specifically, the articles highlight issues of responsibility within each component of the criminal justice system: police, courts, and corrections.

Although reintegrative shaming theory suggests that, in comparison to males, females are more interdependent and thus susceptible to reintegrative rather than disintegrative shaming, it is unclear how gender affects the type of shame experienced when considering interpersonal dynamics within restorative justice conferences. The involvement of the community within these conferences may affect how offenders are viewed, especially when considering the stigma female offenders experience for violating legal and gender norms. Using data from the Reintegrative Shaming Experiments, we find that interdependency conditions how gender affects the experience of shaming based on the type of others with whom offenders are interdependent.

Recent research has shown how identities are affected by, and resistant to, reflected appraisals, or how individuals perceive others view them. Despite renewed interest in criminal identity negotiation, the implications that the sanctioning context has for affecting the identity verification process of offenders has been underresearched. Using a sample of 498 restorative justice and 475 court participants in the Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), we discover that the effect of discrepancies between reflected appraisals and offender self-views on emotions and projected conformity vary by conference and court processing. These findings suggest that identity processes need to be considered when examining how offenders are sanctioned.

In this article, we investigate factors affecting hate crime policies by examining anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) hate crime reports as a type of policy implementation. Analyzing state-level data drawn primarily from the US Census between 1995 and 2008, we examine how structural and social movement mobilization factors explain hate crime reporting. We find that anti-LGBT hate crimes are more likely to be reported in more urbanized states and in states with both split political elites and a greater number of LGBT social movement organizations. We discuss the implications of our findings for separating the drivers of policy passage from policy implementation and for complementary criminological and social movement explanations for hate crime reporting.

Research suggests that offenders perceive restorative justice (RJ) conferences as more just and reintegrative than standard court proceedings. Yet, little research focuses on how the nature of the offense may affect these social psychological processes, and studies that investigate how offenders perceive justice typically examine justice in general, not specific types (procedural vs. interactional). Using data from the Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), we find that offense type is differentially associated with types of justice and shaming perceptions, demonstrating the need to distinguish between interactional and procedural justice to understand how various offenders experience the RJ conference.

Gender and race condition perceptions of and responses to injustice associated with strain. Yet, it is unclear how various types of injustice (distributive, procedural, and interactional) affect criminal coping by gender and race - especially among Asians and whites. A vignette of an academic group project that depicted a distributive injustice and manipulated procedural and interactional injustice was randomly assigned to a sample of undergraduates. Analyses reveal that injustice is associated with Asian and white males engaging in different types of deviance. Implications for the relationship that gender and race have in affecting perceptions of and responses to injustice are discussed.

Parents’ and their children’s perceptions of how much parents know about the child’s activities outside parental presence (parental knowledge) are important for understanding delinquency. Yet, conceptual and methodological deficiencies in prior research may limit this understanding. Reexamining how these perceptions affect delinquency, we find that contrary to conventional wisdom: (1) adolescent and parent perceptions of parental knowledge impact delinquency jointly rather than independently and (2) the protective effect of adolescent perceptions weakens as parent perceptions increase. Specifically, when parental perceptions are strongest, the delinquency inhibiting effect of adolescent perceptions is offset, which may result from stress of parents’ monitoring efforts.

Research indicates that mismatches between individuals' identity standards and how they perceive others view them, or reflected appraisals (RAs), produce distress that individuals may attempt to alleviate by altering their behavior so as to achieve identity verification. While there has been a recent interest in understanding how individuals negotiate a criminal identity, little research has been conducted in naturalistic settings based on specific experiences and feedback received from others. We assess how discrepancies between one's criminal self-view and RAs affect negative emotions and projected conformity after individuals are processed in the criminal justice system. Using a sample of 973 participants in the Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments, we find that discrepancies between criminal identities and RAs affect the amount of shame/guilt and embarrassment experienced by offenders and their projected conformity and that embarrassment mediates this relationship.

An essential element of the restorative justice process is engagement in emotional healing, which is made possible via the ways in which offenders manage shame. Effective shame management depends in part on the operation of justice principles. While research has examined justice and the importance of emotions in facilitating the restorative justice process, further investigation is necessary to understand how various types of justice affect emotions and facilitate the restoration of offenders. This article provides an overview of major findings regarding the relationship between justice, attributions, and emotions and how these findings relate to restorative justice. Implications for research in restorative justice are also discussed.

Perceptions of injustice rely upon a sense-making process in which individuals attempt to understand why and how it occurs. We draw from the attribution-of-blame model of justice judgments to examine how two work groups of disparate status make sense of the treatment and outcomes engendered by their interactions. Data from 27 in-depth interviews with custodians and teachers reveal that when custodians perceive disrespect from teachers and teachers perceive that custodians do not fulfill properly their duties, their attributions are shaped by their status position. Although both make internal attributions to each other for their injustice, teachers do not recognize how they perpetrate injustice against custodians and custodians perceive greater injustice by identifying how external factors affect their performance and blame. This unjustified blame fosters counterproductive work behaviors, illustrating how interdependencies fuel a cycle of injustice. We discuss the implications of these findings for the school and justice processes.