Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
A substantial body of research shows that people's legal attitudes can have wide-ranging behavioral consequences. In this article, I use original survey data to examine long-term immigrant detainees’ legal attitudes. I find that the majority of detainees express a felt obligation to obey the law, and do so at a significantly higher rate than other U.S. sample populations. I also find that the detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities is significantly related to their evaluations of procedural justice, as measured by their assessments of fair treatment while in detention. This finding remains robust controlling for a variety of instrumental and detainee background factors, including the detainees’ experiences with the legal system and legal authorities in their countries of origin. Finally, I find that vicarious procedural justice evaluations based on detainees’ assessments of how others are treated are as important to detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities as their personal experiences of fair or unfair treatment. I discuss the broader implications of these findings and their contributions to research on procedural justice and legal compliance, and research on legal attitudes of noncitizens.
Caitlin Patler collaborated on data collection. I am grateful to Thomas Baker, Gillian Hadfield, Anil Kalhan, Greg Keating, Dan Klerman, Tom Lyon, Cecilia Menjívar, Dan Simon, Jayashri Srikantiah, and the reviewers and editors at the Law & Society Review for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am grateful to David Grusky, Tomás Jiménez, and Bruce Western for their generous support. This research was supported by grants from the American Sociological Association/National Science Foundation Advancement of the Discipline Fund, Russell Sage Foundation (award #93-16-06), Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, USC Population Research Center, and the USC Gould School of Law.