Developmental Trajectories of Legal Socialization Among Serious Adolescent Offenders

Legal socialization is the process through which individuals acquire attitudes and beliefs about the law, legal authorities, and legal institutions. This occurs through individuals' interactions, both personal and vicarious, with police, courts, and other legal actors. To date, most of what is known about legal socialization comes from studies of individual differences among adults in their perceived legitimacy of law and legal institutions1, and in their cynicism about the law and its underlying norms.2 This work shows that adults' attitudes about the legitimacy of law are directly tied to individuals' compliance with the law and cooperation with legal authorities.3 Despite the potential importance of the development of these attitudes about law and their connection to illegal behavior, previous research on legal socialization prior to adulthood (i.e., adolescence) is rare. Although some writers have discussed the ways in which family members and adults in the community shape children's and adolescents' attitudes and beliefs about law-related matters,4 little is known about the ways in which adolescents' legal socialization is shaped by their actual contact with the legal system. In fact, only a very small number of studies have examined legal socialization prior to adulthood.5 These studies have examined children's perceptions of law and legal procedures,6 rights and a “just world,”7 and legal reasoning.8 These early studies generally have relied either on cross-sectional or experimental designs, often with general population samples of young adults. As such, they are generally silent on the developmental component of legal socialization, the role of socializing conditions, and processes that children experience in everyday life. The process of legal socialization should be particularly salient during adolescence, since this is the developmental period during which individuals are beginning to form an adult-like understanding of society and its institutions,9 and when they venture outside the closed systems of family and schools to experience laws and rules in a variety of social contexts where rule enforcement is more integrated with the adult world. In childhood, their experiences are limited to interactions with a small circle of authorities, such as school officials or store security guards, whose power is real, but whose formal legal status is ambiguous. More typically, whatever exposure children have had to law has been vicarious through family, friends or neighbors. But in contrast to children, adolescents' experiences with these new social and legal contexts should have more powerful influences in shaping notions of fairness and the moral underpinnings of law. Studies forecast that these notions of the fairness and morality of legal rules developed during adolescence may influence subsequent behavior in interactions with legal authorities as adults.10 Accordingly, it is reasonable to expect that interactions with legal authorities during late childhood and into adolescence should influence the development of notions of law, rules, and agreements among members of society, including adolescents, as well as the legitimacy of authority to deal fairly with citizens who violate society's rules. 11 Moreover, as a developmental outcome via socialization processes,12 legal socialization is similar to, and intertwined with, many other unfolding changes (e.g., psychosocial maturity) that occur during this period as well as with potentially powerful experiences of adolescence. One would expect perceptions about the legitimacy of law to change considerably during this time period, reflecting an ongoing dynamic between experiences and attitudes across several social contexts. In short, similar to other developmental processes which tend to grow over time and vary throughout the population, legal socialization also should exhibit growth, development, or vacillation as experience grows. However, contact with the police and courts are infrequent among adolescents, even those in high-risk neighborhoods.13 As a result, most subjects in general population samples have little experience in the juvenile or criminal justice systems, and thus have a limited experiential basis to inform their notions regarding the law. Accordingly, studies of legal socialization in community samples of adolescents offer limited contributions to our understanding of the ways in which attitudes about the law, legal authorities, and legal institutions develop as a result of actual contact with the legal system. To better examine legal socialization as a developmental process, it is necessary to study a sample of juvenile offenders over time. In short, because adolescents are likely to vary in their patterns of legal socialization, just as they do in other developmental domains, longitudinal studies are needed to map out the natural history of development in this socio-legal domain, especially during critical developmental periods for adolescents who have nontrivial experiences with the justice system. This study advances our understanding of legal cynicism and legitimacy in several, ways. First, we focus on adolescents. With few exceptions,14 prior studies have examined these dimensions of law-related behavior among adults. 15 If legal socialization develops during adolescence, closer measurement of this domain during that critical period is necessary to accurately identify a developmental process within the changing context of adolescence. Second, this study is the first to examine legal socialization over time in a developmental framework showing the stability or change in these domains during a critical developmental transition from late adolescence to early adulthood. Third, we examine legal socialization among active offenders. Prior work on legitimacy and legal cynicism has analyzed data from general population or community samples, where active offenders often are under-sampled. To the extent that legal cynicism and legitimacy are implicated in compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors, we might expect these developmental outcomes to be skewed for offenders. Until this study, there has been very little research on active offenders,16 and none longitudinally, that considers the developmental patterning of legal socialization. Accordingly, we analyze data from a juvenile court sample of adolescent offenders charged with serious crimes. Using data from four waves of interviews over eighteen months, we analyze variation in the developmental trajectories of two specific dimensions of legal socialization: legal cynicism and legitimacy. We next identify factors that might relate to the different developmental trajectories. To the best of our knowledge, the current investigation provides the first set of data on the longitudinal, within-individual patterning of two aspects of legal socialization among adolescents, specifically serious youthful offenders, a particularly important theoretical and policy-relevant group.17