Why delays in delivering justice lead to harsher sentencing
scientificamerican.com/article/why-delays-in-delivering-justice-lead-to-harsher-sentencing
It occurred to us that people in a position to determine justice—whether they are judges or other evaluators—often expect swift consequences. When this process is disrupted, we reasoned, they may find it unfair. Did they seek to correct for a process that they believed had unfairly benefited the transgressor? In a series of studies, we discovered that is indeed the case. Delays in arrests or sentencing increased punishment severity.
Time and Punishment: Time Delays Exacerbate the Severity of Third-Party Punishment
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976231173900
Despite the normative prerogative that time delays should not influence punishment severity, we draw on—and advance—a descriptive view of punishment to suggest that time delays may increase punishment severity. On the basis of extensive research that portrays people as intuitive justice theorists (Bies, 1987; Mooijman & Graham, 2018), we suggest that time delays could lead to increases in punishment severity because people interpret time delays—more specifically the process that led them to occur—as unfair. Indeed, evaluators often believe that crimes should be swiftly followed by an appropriate punishment that will provide transgressors their just deserts (Kleiman et al., 2014; McDonnell & Nurmohamed, 2021). However, time delays, at least temporarily, enable transgressors to avoid facing the repercussions that typically follow a crime. That is, third parties generally believe that transgressors should receive an appropriate punishment shortly after their crime, yet time delays inhibit this process. Furthermore, third parties may view time delays as especially problematic because of the experiential nature of time—time delays are irreversible and cannot be taken back. Thus, when transgressors experience time delays between their crime and corresponding punishment, even when the delays are outside of their control and/or not their fault, they gain a period of time in which they are uniquely unpunished for their specific transgression, a process that we contend third parties will view as unfair (Cohen-Charash & Mueller, 2007).
