Kristina Murphy

Who they are

Murphy's Griffith University profile gives her title as Associate Professor in the School of Criminology. Her research centres on procedural justice, the idea that fair and respectful treatment by authorities encourages cooperation and voluntary compliance. The profile describes her work as combining psychology and regulatory theory, and as arguing that effective regulation responds to people's needs, values and behaviours.

She applies the idea across several settings: policing, taxation, environmental regulation and social security. A named project is a longitudinal survey of over 2,000 Australians about their views of policing, described as the first body of Australian research on procedural justice and legitimacy in policing. She has also held two grants with University of Queensland researchers, on improving police relationships with ethnic minority groups and on fostering Muslim cooperation with police in counter-terrorism initiatives.

The link between those interests and the 2007 paper is direct. Procedural justice asks how people experience being treated by authority. Reintegrative shaming theory asks whether a sanction is delivered with respect or with stigma. Both treat the quality of treatment, not only the severity of the penalty, as something that shapes later compliance. That shared emphasis is why the 2007 study sits naturally within her research.

Key papers

Shaming, shame and recidivism (2007)

Murphy and Harris, British Journal of Criminology, 47(6), 900-917. The paper reports an empirical test of Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming theory in the white-collar crime context, using survey data from 652 tax offenders. Its authors open by observing that the theory is popular in criminology but has rarely been tested. The central finding is that taxpayers who felt their enforcement experience was reintegrative, rather than stigmatising, were less likely to report having evaded their taxes two years later. Shame-related emotions were found to partially mediate the effect of reintegration on later offending. The authors discuss what the findings mean for regulating white-collar offenders.

Procedural justice and tax compliance

Her research record also includes work on procedural justice and tax compliance and on the relationship between procedural justice, legitimacy and tax non-compliance. These were located in searches but were not read for this page.

Key ideas

The idea this site uses is the measurement of reintegration as an experience. Instead of asking how severe or how public a sanction was, the 2007 study asked how the person felt they had been treated. That moves the question from the agency's procedure to the person's perception, and it makes the finding an association between a reported experience and a reported later behaviour.

Two cautions come with that. Because both the experience and the later evasion were reported by the same people in a survey, the result cannot show that a more reintegrative procedure would produce less evasion. And reported evasion depends on what people are willing to say. The paper's contribution is that it tests a theory that had mostly been argued, and that in this sample the theory's predicted direction held, with shame-related emotions as part of the pathway.

The article on public shaming places the study beside two others: a field experiment on tax delinquents by Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Ugo Troiano, which varied visibility, and a study of jail inmates by June Tangney and colleagues, which measured shame and guilt as traits. None of the three follows publicly shamed people over time. The tax-offender survey is the one that speaks most directly to how a sanction is delivered.

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