Citation

King A, Maruna S. Punishm. Soc. 2009; 11(2): 147-169.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1462474508101490

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

As in the adage that 'a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged', many presume that punitive public attitudes are derived from the direct experience of crime and victimization. People become 'fed up' with criminality and seek to strike back at lawbreakers. Social theories of punitiveness, on the other hand, typically portray punitiveness as a form of scape-goating in which offenders are just a stand-in population, masking more abstract anxieties. This survey was designed to explore both of these hypotheses with a sample (N = 940) of the British public. A multivariate analysis of survey responses finds that factors such as concerns about the economy and the state of 'the youth today' account for a substantial proportion of the effect of actual crime concerns on punitiveness. Crime-related factors, such as victimization experiences or anxieties about crime, on the other hand, do not appear to be strong predictors of punitiveness in this sample.

Language: en