Development and Breadth of Organizational Psychology of Criminal Justice

Development and Breadth of Organizational Psychology of Criminal Justice

Introduction

This paper intends to provide the reader with a literature review of what we consider to be the main theoretical and empirical development and breadth of organizational psychology of criminal justice. In a careful analysis of the organizational psychology of justice we can conclude that this subject area is an important branch of organizational psychology. In fact, the Organizational Psychology of Justice occupies a chapter in the latest edition of the Handbook of Organizational Psychology; there are magazines that area (e.g., Organizational Justice Research) and associations specifically devoted to its study (e.g., International Society for Justice Research). In addition to these data, and as we will see in the references of this article, most of the references in this discipline are the most important magazines of Organizational Psychology and the Journal of Personality and Organizational Psychology, the Personality and Organizational Psychology Bulletin, or Advances in Experimental Organizational Psychology and also in the Organizational Psychology, Organizational Behavior like and Human Decision Processes.

Far from if you want to do a thorough analysis of the literature of organizational psychology of justice, that the manuals is usually more of a organizational psychology applied to the judicial system, criminal and prison, it is intended with this article provide a literature review of what we consider to be the major theoretical developments and empirical organizational psychology of justice. For this systematic approach we break the chains of justice Theoretical research identified by Tyler, Boeckman, Smith, and Huo (1997): relative deprivation, distributive justice, procedural justice, retributive justice, and we added restorative justice (Braithwaite, 1999).

Under The Organizational Psychology of Justice

The Organizational Psychology of Justice studies the causes and consequences of subjective judgments of what is fair or unfair (Tyler, Boeckman, Smith, & Huo, 1997). Unlike philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Marx and Rawls that attempted to define which standards should govern societies, organizational psychologists have studied what people think is right or wrong, fair or unfair is and understand how people justify these judgments (Tyler & Smith, 1998). In fact, we know is very important to know what the common man thinks about justice because research has shown that people act and react according to what they think is fair.

Tyler et al. (1997) distinguish four eras of justice in the investigation: the era of relative deprivation (early 1945), the era of distributive justice (years 60 and 70), the era of procedural justice (80s and 90s), and the era of retributive justice (Emergency in the 90s). We would add that restorative justice has emerged from the late '80s and is highly relevant today.

Despite some attempts towards a theoretical integration, most studies conducted in this area is focused on only one type of justice (distributive, procedural, retributive or restorative), as we will see throughout this paper. The most common exception is the case of the studies that tried to compare the effects of procedural justice compared to distributive justice, which is ...