CYNICAL STREETS: NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL PROCESSES AND PERCEPTIONS OF CRIMINAL INJUSTICE*

• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Author: PATRICIA Y. WARREN,RONALD L. SIMONS,MARK T. BERG,ERIC A. STEWART,JONATHAN INTRAVIA
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12113
• Date: 01 August 2016

CYNICAL STREETS: NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL

PROCESSES AND PERCEPTIONS OF CRIMINAL

INJUSTICE∗

MARK T. BERG,1ERIC A. STEWART,2JONATHAN INTRAVIA,3

PATRICIA Y. WARREN,2and RONALD L. SIMONS4

1Department of Sociology, University of Iowa

2College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University

3Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Ball State University

4Department of Sociology, University of Georgia

KEYWORDS: moral and legal cynicism, neighborhood effects, criminal injustice, per-

ceptions of the law

Studies have found that African Americans are more likely to perceive racial bi-

ases in the criminal justice system than are those from other racial groups. There is a

limited understanding of how neighborhood social processes affect variation in these

perceptions. This study formulates a series of hypotheses focused on whether perceived

racial biases in the criminal justice system or perceptions of injustice vary as a function

of levels of moral and legal cynicism as well as of adverse police–citizen encounters.

These hypotheses are tested with multilevel regression models applied to data from a

sample of 689 African Americans located in 39 neighborhoods. Findings from the re-

gression models indicate that the positive association between structural disadvantage

and perceptions of injustice is accounted for by moral and legal cynicism. Furthermore,

adverse police encounters significantly increase perceptions of injustice; controlling for

these encounters reduces the strength of the association between cynicism and injustice

perceptions. Finally, the findings reveal that cynicism intensifies the association be-

tween adverse police encounters and perceptions of criminal injustice. The results are

discussed in terms of their implications for research regarding perceived biases in the

criminal justice system and neighborhood social processes.

Within advanced democracies, the enforcement power of the state hinges on the pub-

lic support it receives. For the state to secure voluntary compliance from the public, it

is necessary for it to be perceived as morally credible (Erickson and Parent, 2007). But

concerns about the unlawful exercise of state power surface in national debates involving

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2016.54.issue-3/issuetoc.

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH48165, MH62669)

and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (029136-02), with additional funding by the

National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and

the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station (Project #3320). We wish to thank

Ethan Rogers for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Direct correspondence to Mark T. Berg, Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, W126

Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA 52241 (e-mail: mark-berg@uiowa.edu).

C2016 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12113

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 54 Number 3 520–547 2016 520

NEIGHBORHOOD CYNICISM AND PERCEIVED INJUSTICE 521

controversial policing tactics, mass incarceration, and racial profiling. African Americans

have a long history of being unfairly stopped, questioned, and searched by the police

and subject to more severe punishments than people from other racial groups (Brunson

and Gau, 2014: 63; Spohn, 2014). In fact, claims about unwarranted police treatment of

African Americans have recently sparked civil unrest in several American cities, including

Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri. Such acute perceptions of racial injustice

in the application of the law reflect public concerns that the police are not exercising their

authority in accord with principles of equity and impartiality (Hagan and Albonetti, 1982;

Shedd and Hagan, 2006). Regardless of their objective basis, these perceptions can frac-

ture critical ties between the police and the public that are necessary for the co-production

of public safety (Brunson, 2007).

A growing amount of criminological evidence reveals that perceived biases in the crim-

inal justice system vary closely with dimensions of social stratification. People located

in disadvantaged structural positions are more likely to express greater doubts about

the fairness of the criminal justice system (Jacob, 1971; Unnever, Gabbidon, and Hig-

gins, 2011) than are people from advantaged structural positions. Specifically, African

Americans tend to perceive racial disparities in arrest, incarceration, and capital punish-

ment as a reflection of biases in the functioning of the system and social institutions more

broadly (Hagan, Shedd, and Payne, 2005; Walker, Spohn, and DeLone, 2007). These

perceptions are not uniformly held among African Americans, and the sources of this

within-group variation are not well understood. Furthermore, we have good reasons to

believe that perceptions of injustice have an ecological basis. Perhaps the intersection of

racial and structural deprivation produces neighborhood processes that lead people to

hold stronger misgivings about the fairness of the criminal justice system. According to

Hagan, Shedd, and Payne (2005: 400), more attention should be directed at the

“community-connected experiences and cognitive processes that accompany changing

perceptions of criminal injustice.” Although prior work has forged a critical foundation,

it is important to move beyond the question of whether neighborhoods affect perceptions

of criminal injustice to the more crucial question of how they matter.

Strands of theoretical research have emphasized the role of neighborhood cultural

mechanisms with particular emphasis on norms pertaining to the viability of formal law

and conventional rules (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003). Within this vein, various concep-

tual models imply that coexisting elements of moral and legal cynicism form an emer-

gent contextual mechanism through which structural deprivation generates perceptions of

criminal injustice. This process can undermine the procedural qualities of police–citizen

interactions leading people to perceive biases in the criminal justice system that are sys-

tematically structured along racial dimensions. Prior research has underscored the signifi-

cance of “place-based encounters” with the police in generating unfavorable dispositions

toward legal authorities (Weitzer, 2000), while illuminating the impact of cynicism on

public engagement with legal authorities (Kirk and Matsuda, 2011). The purpose of the

current study is to examine whether perceptions of racial biases in the criminal justice sys-

tem develop at the intersection of neighborhood processes and negative encounters with

legal authorities.

First, we contend that neighborhood disadvantage fosters a culture of moral and le-

gal cynicism. Second, we expect that negative or unfavorable police–citizen encounters

are more likely to occur in neighborhoods with greater levels of cynicism than they are

in other neighborhoods. Consequently, these encounters might generate perceptions of