ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the theory of procedural justice, reviews the empirical evidence regarding its effectiveness in policing, and discusses the gaps and challenges facing this theory of criminal justice as the field moves forward. Leading up to the mid-1970s, the main line of inquiry for justice researchers focused solely on distributive justice—the notion that an allocation of outcomes is deemed fair when they are distributed according to certain criteria. Research concerning procedural justice and policing would lay relatively dormant until the pivotal work of Tom R. Tyler in his book Why People Obey the Law. The combination of sources and content for procedural justice judgments produce a typology of four independent bases on which people may form their overall evaluations or perceptions of procedural justice. Furthermore, in 2011, using confirmatory factor analysis, J. M. Gau found that procedural justice may be more than the concepts of quality of treatment and quality of decision-making.
