Abstract
Research examining the legal socialization process continues to be almost exclusively focused on US adolescents, calling into question the generalizability of this body of work. The purpose of this study was to test a popular model of legal socialization — the procedural justice model — amongst a representative sample of young adolescents in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Approximately 750 12 year-olds completed a survey assessing their direct and vicarious contact with police, judgments of police procedural justice, crime perceptions, police legitimacy, legal cynicism, and criminal offending. Both direct and indirect experience with the police was associated with lower procedural justice. Police legitimacy was associated with both procedural justice and crime perceptions; however, legal cynicism was only associated with perceptions of crime. Finally, higher perceptions of police legitimacy, but not legal cynicism, was associated with lower levels of self-reported offending. Overall, this study showed mixed support for the generalizability of the procedural justice model of legal socialization. While the links among police contact, procedural justice, police legitimacy, and offending were substantively identical to findings from the US, no support was found for the argument of legal cynicism as an additional mechanism linking police contact to criminal offending in youth.
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