Abstract
How can public opinion research help achieve badly needed criminal justice reforms? Unfortunately, public opinion has frequently been used in ways that help construct barriers to reform. Understanding the reasons—the influences on public opinion about crime and justice, the popularity of punitiveness and reform, and the way political actors interpret opinion—for this is important. But there is also promise in public opinion research for achieving a more just system, and public opinion research can also be a tool in elevating structurally marginalized voices, as well as those most impacted by crime and justice processes. Doing so requires a commitment to involving diverse voices inside and outside the academy, as well as a thoughtful and mutually beneficial integration of theory and public opinion research.
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Data Availability
Data are available from the American National Election Studies.
Notes
The cumulative data file includes data from every American National Election Studies ‘Time Series’ survey from 1948–2020. The racial resentment and death penalty questions were asked in the same survey 10 times between 1988 and 2020. Racial resentment is a measure of modern racism widely used in prior work (Henry & Sears, 2002). In each survey year, I measure this as the average response (on five-point agreement scales) to four questions: whether Blacks should overcome prejudice and work their way up without “special favors,” whether slavery and discrimination created conditions that remained significant barriers for lower-class Blacks, whether Blacks had gotten less than they deserved, and whether inequalities would be solved if Blacks tried harder. The second and third questions are reverse-coded such that high values of the measure reflect greater racial resentment. In each survey respondents were asked whether they favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder. I use included sample weights to make the sample look more like the voting-age population of the US in that year. The table presents the estimates of the correlations (all of which are significant at the p < .001 level) plus the sample sizes for each of the survey years.
A panel of voters was asked how the nation’s current crime rate compared to 2001 6 times over an 18-month period between January of 2008 and July of 2009. I used weights to make the data more representative of the population eligible to vote in in the 2008 presidential election and restricted the sample to those who did vote for McCain or Obama. Respondents were given five answer categories., and in each wave the average respondent answered somewhere between the third (“about the same”) and fourth (“somewhat higher”) answer category. The graph presents means and 95 percent confidence intervals for each of the six waves in which this question was asked for two groups of respondents: those who voted for John McCain in November of 2008 and those who voted for Barack Obama. All respondents who voted for McCain or Obama and answered the question are included in each wave, from a low of 1419 respondents in wave 6 to a high of 2690 in wave 9, but the results are substantively identical when restricting the sample to the 1010 respondents who answered the question in all 6 waves.
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Drakulich, K. Public Opinion and Criminal Justice Reform. Am J Crim Just 47, 1166–1185 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-022-09716-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-022-09716-2