AN ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD THE INSANITY DEFENSE*

Results from a public opinion survey of knowledge, attitudes, and support for the insanity defense indicate that people dislike the insanity defense for both retributive and utilitarian reasons: they want insane lawbreakers punished, and they believe that insanity defense procedures fail to protect the public. However, people vastly overestimate the use and success of the insanity plea. Several attitudinal and demographic variables that other researchers have found to be associated with people's support for the death penalty and perceptions of criminal sentencing are also related to support for the insanity defense. Implications for public policy are discussed.     

INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL DETERMINANTS OF CORRECTIONAL OFFICER ATTITUDES TOWARD INMATES*

This paper analyzes the impact of individual attributes and organizational influences in the determination of correctional officers’attitudes toward inmates. Drawing on survey data from 179 line-level correctional officers, the analysis evaluates the expectations of prison reformers that more highly educated, female, and minority officers will hold more positive attitudes toward their inmate clientele. Contrary expectations drawn from the sociology of work literature suggest that the work-role socialization will overshadow the effect of individual attributes in the determination of officer attitudes. The analysis reveals that minority officers hold more positive orientations toward inmates, while education and gender exert no impact. In addition, organizational-level characteristics are also important in the prediction of officer views of inmates. These findings suggest that correctional reforms that focus primarily on changing the demographic composition of correctional officers are quite unlikely to ameliorate significantly the tension in today's prisons. It is necessary for both reformers and social scientists to develop more sophisticated analyses of the interplay between individual attributes and work organization characteristics and their joint effects on behavior in the prison setting.     

DETERMINANTS OF ATTITUDES TOWARD CITY POLICE

This paper reports the results of a survey of attitudes toward police and police service among 273 citizens in 4 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Extensive socioeconomic and personal history data were collected for all individuals. Results indicate that personal history. particularly respondents’perceptions of the way in which specific officers have related to them personally in previous encounters, is a more significant determinant of general attitudes towards police than were all socioeconomic variables including race and income. Results thus suggest that positive styles of policing will significantly affect police-community relations, and that police-community relations programs stressing officer-citizen interaction in a law enforcement context will have the highest probability of success.     

NORMALIZATION AND LEGITIMATION: MODELING STIGMATIZING ATTITUDES TOWARD EX-OFFENDERS*

Successful community reentry and the criminological impact of incarceration may depend in part on the attitudes (and consequent reactions) that prisoners encounter after release. Theories of social stigma suggest that such attitudes depend, in turn, on the levels of familiarity with the stigmatized group (the normalization thesis) as well as on the credibility and trust they accord to sanctioning agents (the legitimation thesis). To assess these two hypotheses, we present the first multivariate analysis of public attitudes toward ex-offenders. Data from a four-state, random-digit telephone survey of more than 2,000 individuals indicate that, net of controls, personal familiarity with ex-offenders may soften attitudes, whereas confidence in the courts may harden them. As expected, non-Hispanic Whites, conservatives, and southern residents hold more negative views of ex-offenders. Our findings lend indirect support to concerns that incarceration is becoming “normalized”, and we suggest strategies for reducing the stigma of incarceration.     

JAPANESE AND AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD THE ABOLITION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Japanese and Americans are compared in terms of the extent each sample believes that capital punishment should be abolished, Blacks and white American females are more likely to approve of the abolition of capital punishment. No differences by sex were found in the Japanese sample. For both countries, those who are younger and more educated hold less punitive attitudes The Japanese as a whole are less likely than Americans to approve of the abolition of capital punishment. Problems found in cross-cultural secondary analysis are discussed.     

PRISONERS' ATTITUDES TOWARD COMPONENTS OF THE LEGAL AND JUDICIAL SYSTEMS

Prisoners' attitudes toward components of the legal and judicial systems are reviewed and analyzed with data collected from prisoners in their first several days of incarceration. These data are analyzed within subgroups of the prison population. In general, attitudes toward the police are negative, attitudes toward the law and the judicial system are mixed, and attitudes toward lawyers are positive. However, preprison and prison status factors influence the attitudes held by prisoners, and these different patterns of influence are discussed.     

PRISON GUARDS' ATTITUDES TOWARD COMPONENTS OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

Only recently has there been very much interest in prison guards, their behavior, or their attitudes. Although prisons and their prisoners have been the subject of many investigations, the keepers have been overlooked. This article reports guards’attitudes toward the criminal justice system and suggests what these attitudes may mean.     

JUDICIAL INFLUENCE IN CHANGING ATTITUDES TOWARD USE OF WORK RELEASE

Judges are under pressure both to combat crime with longer prison sentences and to increase the use of sentencing options which permit use of a graduated system of dispositions which can be used to rehabilitate offenders. The judges are faced with overcrowded prisons and a general lack of the community programs recommended by many professional organizations and scholars. It is recommended here that judges take an active role in encouraging the development of community-based alternatives such as local work release. This study found that a male judge is a more effective communicator than a bailiff and that he could cause a change in attitude toward work release in a sample of citizens. Thus, judges can anticipate some degree of success if they choose to participate in efforts to develop community support for sentencing alternatives.     

RANDOM ASSIGNMENT,THE LEAST FAIR OF THEM ALL: PRISONERS’ATTITUDES TOWARD VARIOUS CRITERIA OF SELECTION*

This study examines perceptions of fairness and attitudes of offenders toward random assignment as compared to other selection methods used in evaluation research for allocating benefits or assigning inmates to programs. Three hundred and forty-eight inmates in three federal institutions were randomly selected and presented questionnaires which surveyed their attitudes toward four selection procedures: random assignment; need; merit; and first come, first served. By a large margin, selection according to need was chosen most frequently as the fairest method, followed in order by merit; first come, first served; and random assignment. In addition, all groups who did not choose random assignment as the fairest selection method consistently rated it as the least fair of the four. The results and analysis suggest that researchers who wish to test innovative programs using randomized experiments need to in form the participants of the meaning and value of randomization.     

CONTROLLING OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN: RACIALIZED VIEWS OF DELINQUENCY AND WHITES’ PUNITIVE ATTITUDES TOWARD JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The juvenile justice system was founded on, and until recently developed around, the idea that society should afford delinquents more leniency and rehabilitative care than adult criminals because of their lower levels of physical and cognitive development and, thus, diminished culpability for law violations and higher amenability to treatment. The past four decades, however, have witnessed a sustained movement to recriminalize delinquency through the enactment of policies that treat juvenile offenders more like their adult counterparts. Feld (1999a) and others have argued that this punitive turn in juvenile justice is in part a result of the racialization of delinquency and violent victimization in the post–Civil Rights era. This study provides the first test of the key assumption underlying this thesis, namely, that Whites’ support for getting tough with juvenile offenders is in part tied to racialized views of youth crime. Drawing on data from a recent national survey, we examine the extent to which relative racial typifications about delinquency and victimization, as well as racial resentment, are associated with general punitiveness toward juvenile offenders as well as support for lower minimum ages of criminal justice jurisdiction. Regression results show that Whites who hold such typifications and those who are more racially resentful are both more likely to embrace punitive youth justice policies and favor transfers for younger offenders. The implications of the findings are discussed.