Why do criminals obey the law? The influence of legitimacy and social networks on active gun offenders.

• Author: Papachristos, Andrew V.

1. INTRODUCTION

   Why do criminals break the law? Although answers to this question typically incorporate individual, contextual, and socio-psychological explanations, the dominant sociological explanations tend to rely heavily on neighborhood structural considerations. That is, most sociologists look to correlates between crime and delinquency on the one hand, and neighborhood social conditions, formal and informal social control, socialization processes, and properties of social networks on the other, to explain why offenders offend. (1) A shorthand way to summarize this rich research tradition is to say that individuals are more likely to break the law when they live in neighborhoods bereft of social, economic, and human capital, when their social networks are saturated with criminal peers and opportunities, and when they are socialized into dense delinquent networks that do not fully admonish deviant behaviors.

   Why do people obey the law? This question is not merely the former question's mirror image. An emergent group of social psychologists and legal scholars have undertaken this inquiry and have considered it to be fundamentally different from the question we asked at the outset. An impressive body of research has followed, remaining for the most part distinct from mainstream sociological theorizing. One of the most important findings from this vein of research is that punishment processes matter a great deal more for encouraging compliance than do punishments themselves. (2) These conclusions are generally based upon surveys of, or experiments with, people in the general population, where criminal offending is rare. And, in contrast to sociological studies that tend to investigate serious and violent crimes, sociolegal scholars exploring compliance tend to study banal violations such as failure to pay parking tickets, speeding, tax compliance, and so on. (3)

   Both research traditions have produced valuable insights regarding law-violating and law-abiding behaviors. However, both approaches also overlook a simple fact of criminality: most criminals--whether serial killers, professional robbers, drug dealers, or embezzlers--comply with the law most of the time. Crimes are episodic, rare events in the everyday lives of just about all offenders. With a few exceptions, the standard sociological approach to the study of crime and deviance focuses solely on the illegal behaviors of offenders, with very little consideration of their law-abiding behaviors. Conversely, compliance research tends to focus on ordinary citizens who have very little desire or ability, or few opportunities, to engage in more serious forms of street crimes. In short, while we have many explanations about why criminals break the law and why ordinary citizens obey the law, we rarely ask: why do criminals obey the law?

   We attempt a study of compliance by surveying active offenders through the Chicago Gun Project (CGP). The CGP posed a series of individual, neighborhood, legitimacy, and social network questions to a sample of 141 offenders in fifty-two Chicago neighborhoods. The survey, originally part of a larger research project, was specifically designed to incorporate a sociological understanding of criminal offending with a focus on offenders' perceptions of legitimacy of law and legal actors as a path to reduction of or desistance from violent crime. (4) The CGP examined how offenders' perceptions of the law and social networks influence their understanding of legal authority and subsequent law-violating behavior.

   Unlike prior studies of criminal offending, this study examines how perceptions of the law--and its agents--influence compliance. Unlike prior research on compliance, this study surveys the subgroup most likely to be the perpetrators and victims of crime, rather than a random sample of the general population. Thus, the CGP offers two considerable advancements over prior research on both criminal offending and compliance.

   Our findings suggest that while criminals as a group have negative opinions of the law and legal authority, gun offenders (just like non-criminals) are more likely to comply with the law when they believe (a) in the legitimacy of legal actors, but especially the police, and (b) that the substance of the law is consistent with their own moral schedules. Moreover, we find variation among respondents' opinions of and compliance with the law. Gang members--but especially gang members with social networks saturated with criminal associates--are significantly less likely to view the law and its agents as legitimate. But individuals (including gang members) with less saturated criminal networks actually tend to have more positive opinions of the law, albeit opinions that are still quite negative overall.

   The paper proceeds as follows. We begin with a theoretical integration of the literatures on procedural justice and the social network variation of peer influence in order to make clear how peer social networks influence individual perceptions of the law. This section explains why the question we pose is important. We next explain the unique nature, value, and limitations of the CGP survey as well as why, despite limitations, it is well suited to answer the central question of our study. We then turn to a discussion of our measurements of legitimacy and social networks, followed by the results of regressions predicting both offender perceptions and illegal behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical significance of our findings.

2. WHY DO ("NORMAL") PEOPLE OBEY THE LAW?

   Research on compliance with the law has flourished over the last two decades. Pioneered by Tom Tyler in Why People Obey the Law, this research emphasizes at least two explanations for compliance with the law and obedience to authority--forced compliance and procedural justice--and then elucidates the difference between them. (5)

   The notion of forced compliance is perhaps the oldest and most basic explanation as to what holds a society together: people obey the law largely out of fear of reprisal from those who hold control over the formal mechanisms of power and punishment. Although scholars have long rejected the simplistic idea that forced compliance alone can breed compliance with the law, these notions of forced compliance form the foundation of deterrence-based crime policies. Policymakers committed to this school of thought believe compliance with the law can be increased by manipulating the severity, certainty, and swiftness of formal legal sanctions. (6) In fact, our most commonly touted criminal justice policies involve increasing the threat and actual use of formal sanctions, such as three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, and increased penalties for certain types of crimes.

   In the Durkheimian tradition, compliance procured solely by the imposition or threat of formal sanctions is costly and, as such, the social order is best guaranteed by gaining support for the legitimacy of the ruling authority. That is, a society will experience greater compliance with the law when a majority of the population shares the belief that the decisions of the ruling powers are legitimate and that the laws are just and "ought" to be obeyed. (7) "[A] legitimate authority is one that is regarded by people as entitled to have its decisions and rules accepted and followed by others." (8) As David Smith summarizes:

   [S]ocial order depends on the widespread belief that the authorities, and their political and legal framework, are legitimate. As long as that belief is widespread, people will largely regulate their own behavior by reference to internalized values that correspond with the law and its underlying principles, and force need only occasionally be used when people get out of line. (9) Thus, from this perspective compliance with the law is best secured by fostering beliefs in the fairness of the legal systems and in the legitimacy of legal actors. Zelditch delves deeper by explaining the conditions under which legitimation can occur, (10) Key to his discussion is the importance of consensus in norms, values, beliefs, purposes, practices, and procedures.

   People encounter the "law" through their direct and indirect experiences with legal actors and the legal system. (11) These encounters shape an individual's perception of the law and her judgments about its fairness and legitimacy, whether the encounters are mundane (getting a parking ticket) or potentially traumatic (facing an accuser in court). For example, in one particularly fascinating piece of research, Paternoster et al. demonstrate that individuals arrested in domestic assault cases are more likely to say that their detention or sentence was "fair" when they are treated with respect by police and prosecutors. (12) Importantly, experiencing a procedure of the law as legitimate is more influential on perceptions of authority and of the law than the actual outcome of the encounter. (13) In other words, people will view a decision or law as legitimate even if the outcome (such as a court decision or a police action) works against their own self-interest, so long as they view the process by which said decision was made as being procedurally just. (14)

   When we refer to legitimacy here, we draw on the social psychological interpretation of that term, as opposed to a normative vision of it. Tyler refers to compliance that flows from a belief that authorities have the right to dictate proper behavior to others as legitimacy-based. (15) Social psychologists have shown that people are more likely to view authorities and the decision that these authorities make as legitimate, and thus worthy of deference, when authorities treat people with dignity and fairness, i.e., when authorities are procedurally fair.

   In the social psychological literature, judgments regarding fairness depend primarily upon a model of procedural justice, (16) and that model, in turn, has a few...