The Stigma of Addiction and Effects on Community Perceptions of Procedural Justice in Drug Treatment Courts

• Date: 01 July 2020
• Author: William L. D. Krenzer,Colleen M. Berryessa
• DOI: 10.1177/0022042620918950
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0022042620918950

Journal of Drug Issues

2020, Vol. 50(3) 303 –328

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0022042620918950

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Article

The Stigma of Addiction and

Effects on Community Perceptions

of Procedural Justice in Drug

Treatment Courts

Colleen M. Berryessa1 and William L. D. Krenzer2

Abstract

We present a series of four between-subject, multifactorial experiments that examine how

labeling offenders with addiction, as well as if that psychiatric label is described to be biologically

influenced, may affect community perceptions regarding the importance of procedural justice in

drug treatment courts. Stigmatization toward addiction is hypothesized to moderate community

views on procedural justice. Labeling with addiction garnered nonsignificant effects on community

perceptions of the importance of procedural justice in drug treatment courts. Yet, patterns of

moderation analyses indicated that participants with higher degrees of stigmatization toward

an offender with addiction, and particularly if that psychiatric label was also described to be

biologically influenced, rated the importance of offenders experiencing aspects of procedural

justice as significantly higher. Higher degrees of public stigmatization associated with the “brain

disease model” of addiction appear to coexist with increased community support for offenders

with such labels experiencing increased procedural justice and fairness.

Keywords

drug treatment courts, experiment, moderation, procedural justice, stigma

Introduction

In recent years, there has been significant literature demonstrating that individuals, including

both offenders and members of the community, believe that legal authorities and decisions made

by them are legitimate and acceptable based on their evaluations of justice during the legal pro-

cess and procedures used (e.g., Lind & Earley, 1992; Paternoster et al., 1997; Tyler, 2006; Tyler

& Wakslak, 2004). This concept, termed procedural justice, is thought to be present in a legal

context when individuals perceive that they or others are experiencing fairness, respect, impar-

tiality, objectivity in decision-making, the opportunity to express one’s viewpoint, appropriate

representation by attorneys, consistency and accuracy in legal decisions, and “being heard” by

decision-makers, particularly judges, who are compassionate, caring, and objective (Tyler, 2006;

Tyler & Blader, 2003). Tyler and Blader (2003) argue that allowing offenders to express their

1Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, USA

2Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Colleen M. Berryessa, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 123

Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.

Email: colleen.berryessa@rutgers.edu

918950JODXXX10.1177/0022042620918950Journal of Drug IssuesBerryessa and Krenzer

research-article2020

304 Journal of Drug Issues 50(3)

views and treating them fairly are key features that affect views of justice in a legal context,

rather than factors solely related to outcomes of legal encounters.

The importance of feeling that the legal process is fair, rather than judging fairness solely from

the legal outcome, supposedly stems from social cooperation; according to the group engage-

ment model of procedural justice, legal processes that are fair and just communicate information

that the individual experiencing procedural justice has worth and status within a community

(Tyler & Blader, 2003). Ultimately, procedural justice communicates the “group value” of a legal

system to a community, and people deem authority figures of a system from which they strongly

identify as legitimate and acceptable (Lind & Tyler, 1988).

How procedural justice affects perceptions of legitimacy, justice, and fairness in the legal

system is not just confined to offenders involved in the system. The importance of procedural

justice to the public and its acceptance of the legal system “is one of the most robust findings in

the justice literature” (Brockner et al., 2001, p. 301). The greater the perceived fairness of a legal

encounter, the higher the likelihood that members of the public will be satisfied with that criminal

justice decision, view the legal authorities as legitimate, and comply with legal decisions (Lind

& Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Blader, 2003; Tyler & Wakslak, 2004). Furthermore, community percep-

tions of procedural justice also help foster legitimacy, or the acceptance of a legal institution and

its authority, which results in beliefs that a legal institution and its decision-makers should be

obeyed (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). People respect the authority and decisions of an individual,

such as a judge, or an entire institution, such as our criminal justice system, when it is perceived

to be procedurally just, and, correspondingly, legitimate (Johnson et al., 2006; Long et al., 2013;

Tyler, 2006).

There has been an abundance of literature testing community perceptions of the importance of

procedural justice in both criminal court and police settings (e.g., Antrobus et al., 2015; Benesh,

2006; Benesh & Howell, 2001; Burke & Leben, 2007; Rosenbaum et al., 2015; Sunshine &

Tyler, 2003), but extending community perceptions of the importance of procedural justice to

drug treatment courts has not yet been undertaken. However, we argue that community percep-

tions of procedural justice in drug treatment court contexts may be complicated by the public’s

views on addiction, which is often at the center of cases in drug treatment courts. Drug addiction

is one of the most scrutinized and stigmatized psychiatric conditions in society (Corrigan et al.,

2009; Schomerus et al., 2011) and can have harmful effects on the functioning and social exclu-

sion of people with addiction (Livingston & Boyd, 2010). As procedural justice is largely based

on social cooperation and group identification with those experiencing procedural justice (Tyler

& Blader, 2003), stigma of the disease, which is a social process, has been thought to potentially

modify the process of social cooperation envisaged by procedural justice theory (Watson &

Angell, 2013). Therefore, as discussed below, stigma toward addiction may affect how the com-

munity perceives the importance regarding if and how offenders are handled justly or fairly in

drug treatment courts.

In this research, we present a series of studies, using multifactorial experimental designs, that

examine community perceptions of procedural justice in drug treatment courts, particularly look-

ing at how labeling offenders with addiction, as well as if the addiction label is described to be

biologically influenced, may influence how different aspects of procedural justice are perceived

to be important in drug treatment courts by the community. As stigmatization toward addiction is

a known societal reaction to addiction and may disrupt social identification with those who have

addiction, the degree to which and the type of stigmatization elicited by participants toward

addiction are hypothesized to moderate their views on procedural justice. Implications for the

legitimacy of drug treatment courts are discussed.