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Legitmacy And Criminal Justice, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Surveys of public opinion over four decades consistently show that Americans have little confidence in the fairness or effectiveness of the criminal justice system and criminal law more generally. This crisis of confidence is most acute among racial minorities: surveys show that more than one in three Whites have little confidence in the police, compared to more than half of Black respondents. Both the lack of confidence and the racial breach in perceptions of the law and legal actors have persisted for nearly four decades, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

But we might reasonably ask whether and …