Public opinion and prosecutor-initiated resentencing in California: Can a racial equity norms message increase support?

Abstract

Prosecutors, as elected officials, are theoretically responsive to public opinion. Evidence suggests that messaging interventions may impact support for justice system reform. However, despite lengthy and racially disparate criminal sentences in the United States and empirical evidence demonstrating the ability of social norms messaging to shift public opinion, the impact of these interventions on attitudes toward sentencing reform has not been tested. In this paper, we test the impact of a social norms message—namely that most Californians believe the justice system to be biased against Black Americans—via a survey experiment of 2,517 Californians on their attitudes toward Second Look (SL) sentencing and Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing (PIR). Though directionally, we see causal increases in support for SL & PIR, this effect is not statistically significant overall. However, supplementary analyses suggest that exposure to this social norm significantly increased support for SL & PIR among Californian Republicans.

Keywords

public opinion sentencing quantitative methods race attitudes

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