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Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal?: ‘Redeemability’ and the Psychology of Punitive Public Attitudes

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Abstract

Several studies have sought to link punitive public attitudes to attribution style and/or lay theories of crime. This research finds that those who believe criminal acts are the result of freely chosen and willful behavior are more likely to be punitive than those who feel crime is the result of external circumstances and constraints. These analyses focus on only one dimension of attributions: locus of control (internal/external). In this analysis, we include a second dimension, thought to be a better predictor of attitudes in social psychological research: stability/instability. In addition to measuring lay theories of crime causation, we also test for “belief in redeemability” (or beliefs about the ability of deviants to change their ways). Our hypothesis is that this other dimension of personal attributions (stability/instability) may be as critical in explaining support for highly punitive criminal justice policies as beliefs about criminal responsibility. We find evidence supportive of this model in an analysis of data from postal survey of residents of six areas in England.

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Notes

  1. See Krosnick et al. (2002) on the advantages of leaving out a “no opinion” option in public opinion survey research.

  2. Four items were constructed so that disagreement would indicate punitiveness. Psychometric research has shown that people are more likely to agree with positively stated items. Items to be reverse coded [indicated by “R”], therefore, are included in each scale to control for such potential bias.

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  1. Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, 28 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom

    Shadd Maruna

  2. Rutgers’s University, New Brunswick, USA

    Anna King

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Maruna, S., King, A. Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal?: ‘Redeemability’ and the Psychology of Punitive Public Attitudes. Eur J Crim Policy Res 15, 7–24 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-008-9088-1

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