Legal socialization for truanting young people: Results from a randomized field trial.

• In Event: Legal Socialization: New Insights and Applications

Abstract

Legal socialization can be stratified into two orientations: coercive socialization which emphasizes punishments, consequences, and rewards as a means to gain compliance with the law and consensual socialization which focuses on conveying the importance of following the law and building trust to increase willing compliance with the law. Police engagement with citizens is generally categorized dichotomously: as being either coercive or consensual. In this paper we argue that some policing interventions – such as Third Party Policing (TPP) – might be delivered with both coercive and consensual elements, fostering consensual legal socialization by conveying the consequences of law violation through the use of procedurally just dialogue. The Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP) operationalized the TPP framework, operationalizing both consensual and coercive elements in an effort to reduce truancy and other behaviors, such as delinquency, in a sample of high truanting youth (N=102). Under randomized field trial conditions, we assessed whether the longitudinal relationship between police legitimacy and self-reported antisocial behavior differed between the experiment and control groups. We find evidence that above average levels of police legitimacy at any given wave were related to lower levels of self-reported antisocial behavior at that same wave, but only for those in the experimental condition.

Authors

• Lorraine Mazerolle, University of Queensland

• Sarah Beth Bennett, University of Queensland

• Emma Antrobus, University of Queensland

• Stephanie Cardwell, The University of Queensland

• Alex Piquero, University of Texas at Dallas