There is a long-standing argument that how people think about punishment is tied directly to their beliefs about why people engage in criminal behavior. Support for a relationship between causal attribution and punitiveness has been found in the literature, with key differences discerned between those who attribute crime to individual characteristics of offenders and those who view crime as a result of structural characteristics. This article broadens the scope of earlier studies through the development and testing of new questions of causation, grounded in the major theories and concepts of criminological theory, and through the use of a national sample. The major finding of the article is that causal attribution is related to individuals' punitiveness, controlling for such variables as age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, income, fear of crime, and people's confidence in the criminal justice system.
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