Abstract
christopher uggen and ryan larson on uneven progress in public opinion.
Keywords
The crime rate surely ranks among the most used and abused social indicators. In politics, media, and popular culture, crime and punishment are invoked to stir up strong public sentiments. But while crime is clearly a social construction, it is also a real concern for individuals, families, and communities. So we can learn a lot by asking a representative sample of Americans what they think about crime and punishment, especially when we track their attitudes and opinions over time. Comparing their thoughts and fears with crime statistics gives us a window into how public opinion tracks “actual” crime.
We focus here on four basic crime stories, as told in the nationally representative General Social Survey (GSS): fear of crime, attitudes about the harshness (or leniency) of the court system, views on police violence, and support for the death penalty. In each case, we argue, American attitudes about crime have begun to align more closely with the best available social indicators on the extent and social distribution of “actual” crime and punishment. Nevertheless, there remains a yawning gap between attitudes and occurrence—and sharp differences based on age, sex, race, and political affiliation.
Fear
As then-Chief Justice Warren Berger wrote in 1981, “Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life.” The top chart shows fear of crime for women and men from 1975 to 2016, plotted alongside the official U.S. arrest rate over that time. Men’s fear hasn’t changed too much over the years, with about one in five men reporting they are “afraid to walk at night” in their own neighborhood. But the percentage of women expressing this level of fear has fallen from about 62% in the mid-1970s to about 40% in the mid-2010s. So, as the arrest rate has fallen, so too has the fear of crime—but mainly for women rather than men. That said, women in 2016 continued to express significantly greater fear of crime than men. To give readers a sense of the variability and precision of these population estimates, the shaded region around the lines shows the standard error for each data series. Fear of crime has also dropped more for older Americans than for youth (not shown). From the 1970s until the mid-2000s, people over 65 expressed greater fear of crime than those aged 18-34, even though their risk of victimization was far lower. In recent years, however, younger Americans have reported the highest rates of fear, which is more consistent with their victimization risk.
Global Social Survey (GSS) crime fears by gender, 1975-2016
Afraid to walk at night in neighborhood?
Source:
GSS Courts, 1975-2016
Are courts too harsh?
Source:
Punishment
While crime has been dropping for decades, U.S. punishment rose so dramatically from 1975 to 2008 that criminologists identify this period as the “mass incarceration” era. Social scientists debate whether harsh punishment is a cause or a consequence of punitive public attitudes, and GSS data show that both scenarios are plausible.
GSS police force by race, 1975-2016
Approve of policeman striking male citizen?
Source:
GSS capital punishment by party ID, 1975-2016
Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?
Source:
When asked whether the courts are too harsh (bottom p. 76), Americans have generally said “no,” even as the U.S. became the world leader in incarceration. The solid line shows the steep increase in the imprisonment rate from 1975 to 2008, and a slight drop since then. Yet from 1975 to 1995, only about 2-5% of Americans believed that the courts were too harsh (versus “not harsh enough” and “about right”), as shown in the dashed line. This has changed, however, in the last two decades. Recall from the previous figure that crime began dropping sharply in the mid-1990s, but punishment kept rising. From 1995 to 2016, the share that would prefer more lenient courts and sentences began rising (from about 3.5% to over 20% in 2016). In short, it remains the case that Americans favor harsh punishment, but the proportion who think the courts are too harsh has risen from one in 20 U.S. adults to over 1 in 5.
While crime is clearly a social construction, it is also a real concern for individuals, families, and communities.
Police Violence
Race and racism in criminal justice is today a front-and-center issue for Black Lives Matter and other social movements. In light of recent highly publicized police killings (including the fatal shootings of Philando Castile in 2016 and Michael Brown in 2014) we might expect declining support for police use of force. Since the 1970s, the GSS has asked U.S. adults whether they would approve of a police officer striking a male citizen. There is a sizeable race gap in support of such violence by police, with over 72% of Whites but less than 50% of people of color saying they would approve of an officer hitting a man in recent years (top left). Although these percentages have declined since the 1970s (and there is greater fluctuation with the line for Black survey respondents due to their smaller numbers, as indicated in the dark shaded region), they have not fallen dramatically. About three-fourths of Whites and almost half of Black and Other survey respondents still approve of police officers striking male citizens in some circumstances. And the trend since 2012 is downward only for Blacks.
Death Penalty
Crime and punishment are highly politicized, particularly in the U.S., where elected officials can quickly and directly implement changes to the criminal code and correctional policy. In the 1960s, a “law and order” agenda helped Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan gain a partisan advantage with voters. By the 1990s, Democrats such as Bill Clinton sought to neutralize this advantage by out-toughing the Republicans on crime policy and rhetoric. Predictably, with both major parties adopting a tough-on-crime stance, punishment continued to increase. As crime began its long decline in the 1990s, it became a far less salient issue in national political debates. In 2017, however, it’s back to the future, as President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions seek to reprise the tough-on-crime rhetoric and policies of former presidents Nixon and Reagan.
Public opinion has never marched in lockstep with shifts in victimization or incarceration.
Although support for the death penalty is a good general indicator of punitiveness, its imposition has followed a much different historical trajectory than incarceration (bottom p. 77). In the early 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in the period between the Furman (1972) and Gregg (1976) cases. Though most Americans still favored capital punishment at the time, support for the death penalty had waned since the 1950s. Although there were only a handful of executions between 1975 and 1980, large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all favored the death penalty. Since that time, the number of executions (shown in the solid line) has risen and fallen, but support among Republicans has remained above 75%. In contrast, the percentage of Democrats favoring the death penalty rose (with both the crime rate and the rate of executions) through the early 1990s, but then fell steadily, finally slipping below 50% in 2016.
Crime, Punishment, and Public Attitudes
Crime and punishment are indeed social constructions, such that public opinion has never marched in lockstep with shifts in victimization or incarceration. Nevertheless, forty years of GSS data suggest that public attitudes about crime have shifted—in ways that parallel changes in the absolute rate of crime and punishment. From fear to punitiveness to police violence, Americans remain deeply divided by race, sex, class, and political partisanship. Overall, however, the fear of crime has fallen, more people are saying that the courts are too harsh and that they oppose both police violence and the death penalty. For many sociologists, such shifts suggest the public is making halting but steady progress toward becoming smarter, rather than tougher, on crime.