Knight, Clint, Connor, Savannah, Bond, Meredith, and McMillan, Ashleigh (2026) Judging justice-involved individuals: support for job offer rescindment, character evaluations and norm violations across transgression types. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law. (In Press)

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Abstract

Two within-subjects experimental studies examined support for rescinding job offers and evaluations of character and social appropriateness for applicants with justice-involvement or other transgressions, manipulated using vignettes. Participants were primarily Australian adults recruited via a university research participation platform and social media. In Study 1 (N = 194; 149 female, 40 male, three non-binary, 40 missing; M age = 34.40, SD = 12.10), an applicant with an unspecified justice-involved history received greater support for offer rescindment than applicants with drug or alcohol use histories and was evaluated more negatively overall. In Study 2 (N = 125; 99 female, 22 male, three non-binary, one missing; M age = 29.66, SD = 13.21), an applicant with a sexual offending history was judged most harshly across all measures compared to violent and drug offending applicants. Overall, findings indicate that justice-involved applicants – particularly those with sexual offences – face elevated stigma and greater reintegration challenges.

Item ID:	94199
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1934-1687
Keywords:	justice-involved; criminal history; offence; transgressor; discrimination; societal violation; reintegration; employment.
Copyright Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited:	07 Oct 2026 03:19
FoR Codes:	52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5205 Social and personality psychology > 520505 Social psychology @ 50% 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified @ 50%
SEO Codes:	23 LAW, POLITICS AND COMMUNITY SERVICES > 2304 Justice and the law > 230403 Criminal justice @ 50% 23 LAW, POLITICS AND COMMUNITY SERVICES > 2399 Other law, politics and community services > 239999 Other law, politics and community services not elsewhere classified @ 50%
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