The Chicken or the Egg: What Shapes Public Opinion on Punishment?

By design, public opinion has had a critical role in the development of policy since the founding of the United States. This has become more evident in an era of instant feedback driven by a 24-hour news cycle, Twitter and YouTube. Yet it can be incredibly difficult to determine what, in turn, drives public opinion. This is true and especially important as scholars attempt to determine what drives changes in public support of punitive criminal justice policies.

In his Criminology article “Punitive Sentiment,” author Mark D. Ramirez attempts to better understand how and why public sentiment about punishment in the nation’s criminal justice system has changed over the past fifty years. He finds that public attitudes are strongly influenced by politicians and how they frame the permissiveness of the justice system.

Since the early 1970s the US prison population has skyrocketed by more than 700 percent. Many scholars believe this increase is partly due to the increase of popular support for stricter penalties for criminal offenders. As Ramirez notes, however, the public’s punitive sentiment is incredibly difficult to measure and is, itself, conceptually hard to define. Specifically, polling questions on criminal justice issues over the past few decades are inconsistent, with some questions being repeated but often with a space of several years in between. Additionally, the author was faced with the difficult task of identifying the questions that would accurately represent public punitive sentiment from a mix of inconsistently worded and focused polling questions asked over spans of decades.

In order to parse out punitive sentiment, Ramirez collected polling data on issues like support for the death penalty, the toughness of courts, three-strikes laws, rehabilitation policies, and delegating more authority to law enforcement. While none of these polling questions were asked consistently throughout the 1951 to 2006 study period, the hope was that together they would capture public opinion on criminal justice matters. Using an algorithm, he was able to track changes in sentiment over time and see how opinion on punishment ebbed and flowed over the study period.

Although there were slight differences in levels of support, most demographics across a wide spectrum of subgroups tended to move similarly over time. Two exceptions to this trend are Republicans and people with college degrees. The former was consistently high and did not track particularly closely with the variation in punitive sentiment over time among independents and Democrats. The latter did generally track, but at a much lower level, appearing to be at least ten points lower than other educational, gender, and racial breakdowns.

The author then began examining his algorithm against potentially influencing factors like presidential statements on crime, measures of public trust in the government, homicide rates, public liberalism, and perceptions of racial integration. While most of these factors had little to no influence on the changes in punitive sentiment, shifts in presidential attitudes about the permissiveness of the justice system was a notable alternative.

As arguably the most visible national political figure in the country, Ramirez contended that it is reasonable to believe that the President’s statements would be representative – albeit only partially – of the political arena’s take on crime. Indeed, Ramirez notes that measures of public punitive sentiment notably decreased under presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, who advocated for treating the social roots of crime, while they increased under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who took more “tough on crime” stances.

While the study only contains data up to 2006, the author shows a marked drop in punitive sentiment since its peak in 1994. Given the easing rhetoric and policy from politicians across parties, this drop makes some sense given Ramirez’s findings. As Americans continue to face difficult and often-emotional decisions about the future of public safety policy, this study suggests that visible leaders can drive public opinion on punishment. Armed with this knowledge, strong leadership could help the United States continue to tackle the challenges to budgets and liberty presented by decades of mass incarceration in new and constructive ways.

Feature Photo: cc/(SalFalko)