Adam Crawford and Anthea Hucklesby (eds), Legitimacy and Compliance in Criminal Justice
| Author | Lieven Pauwels |
| Published date | 01 October 2013 |
| Date | 01 October 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474513494637 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Punishment & Society
15(4) 420–424
! The Author(s) 2013
Book reviews
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474513494637
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Adam Crawford and Anthea Hucklesby (eds), Legitimacy and Compliance in Criminal Justice,
Routledge, 2012; 222 pp.: 9780415671569, £26.99 (pbk), £85.00 (hbk)
This book contains a collection of essays that arose out of an international collo-
quium held at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies in the University of Leeds on
25–26 June 2009. The colloquium brought together a set of internationally
renowned scholars that have been focusing on the study of compliance, trust and
legitimacy in different areas of the criminal justice system and social regulation.
The result is an edited book containing critical reflections with regard to legitimacy
at multiple levels. The issue of legitimacy is taken up from different angles and
therefore is of interest to those scholars that search for an actual overview of key
issues in the debate on trust. Although trust is studied within the criminal justice
system, the scholars that participated in the book do not exclusively start from a
criminologist’s point of view. The study of trust is deeply rooted in thoughts of
classical sociologists, ranging from Weber to Durkheim. Indeed, legitimacy (or the
right to govern and the recognition of that right by the governed, as Beetham
(1991) has defined earlier), is crucial for a criminal justice system to be efficient.
Trust is the basis upon which legitimacy can be built. While that idea is not new to
the field of criminology, it remains puzzling to see that legitimacy has been espe-
cially promoted by coercive force.
The book sets off with an essay by Tom Tyler, who has written numerous works
on the topic of legitimacy and trust. In his essay ‘Legitimacy and compliance: The
virtues of self-regulation’ Tom Tyler argues that the willingness to cooperate with
the police is strongly determined by public judgments of the fairness of treatment.
These judgments are based on direct and indirect contacts with police officers.
Therefore, Tyler argues that it is an important challenge for all actors in the crim-
inal justice system to think of adopting policing styles that motivate voluntary
acceptance and willing cooperation on the part of the public.
Jonathan Jackson, Ben Bradford, Mike Hough and Katherine Murray contrib-
ute with an essay entitled ‘Compliance with the law and policing by consent: Notes
on police and legal legitimacy’. In this essay, the authors present empirical findings
of a representative sample of a survey of England and Wales. Empirical evidence is
presented that supports the idea that people not only abide by the law because they
morally think it is right to do so. Institutions of crime control also play a role in
encouraging citizens to comply with the law. Jackson et al. apply procedural justice
theory to the police and point to the importance of integrating ideas derived from
Book reviews
421
procedural justice theory to situational action theory, a recently developed theory
that explains crime as moral actions. In that theoretical...
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