In 2009, Maruna and King presented results from a British survey showing that the public’s belief in the redeemability of people who committed offenses curbed their level of punitiveness. Based on a 2017 national survey in the United States ( n = 1,000), the current study confirms that redeemability is negatively related to punitive attitudes. In addition, the analyses reveal that this belief predicts support for rehabilitation and specific inclusionary policies (i.e., ban-the-box in employment, expungement of criminal records, and voting rights for people with a felony conviction). Findings regarding measures for punishment and rehabilitation were confirmed by a 2019 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey. These results suggest that beliefs about capacity for change among people who committed offenses are key to understanding crime-control public policy.

Objectives: The recurring mass murder of students in schools has sparked an intense debate about how best to increase school safety. Because public opinion weighs heavily in this debate, we examine public views on how best to prevent school shootings. We theorize that three moral-altruistic factors are likely to be broadly relevant to public opinion on school safety policies: moral intuitions about harm, anger about school crime, and altruistic fear. Methods: We commissioned YouGov to survey 1,100 Americans to explore support for a range of gun control and school programming policies and willingness to pay for school target hardening. We test the ability of a moral-altruistic model to explain public opinion, while controlling for the major predictors of gun control attitudes found in the social sciences. Results: The public strongly supports policies that restrict who can access guns, expand school anti-bullying and counseling programs, and target-harden schools. While many factors influence attitudes toward gun-related policies specifically, moral-altruistic factors significantly increase support for all three types of school safety policies. Conclusions: The public favors a comprehensive policy response and is willing to pay for it. Support for prevention efforts reflects moral intuitions about harm, anger about school crime, and altruistic fear.

Two principal movers of American politics appear increasingly to be connected: racism and guns. The racial content underlying gun rights rhetoric, however, is rarely made explicit during political campaigns. As such, it is possible that espousing pro-gun messages may be an effective way to surreptitiously court prejudiced voters without transgressing popular egalitarian norms. In other words, gun rights rhetoric may function as a racial dog whistle. In the present study, we test this theory using data from a survey experiment conducted with a national sample of registered voters. The findings from our experiment show that election candidates' National Rifle Association (NRA)-funding status and position on gun control impact voters' evaluations, and racial resentment moderates these effects. Racially resentful voters are more likely than low-resentment voters to say they would vote for a candidate when the candidate is funded by the NRA and does not support gun control. This is true among voters who own guns and among those who do not, and it is true regardless of the candidate's political party. The findings also show that there is a backlash effect among low-resentment voters-such individuals are aversive to NRA-funded candidates but strongly supportive of pro-gun control candidates.

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James Jacobs detailed how it has become increasingly difficult to escape the mark of a criminal record. One way to "wipe the slate clean" is through the official expungement of criminal records. We assess public views toward this policy using a national sample of American adults (N = 1,000). Public support for expungement is high for persons convicted of property and substance-related offenses, who stay crime free for 7-10 years, and who "signal" their reform through stable employment and completion of a rehabilitation program. Members of the public are also concerned about unfettered public access to criminal records and want to ensure that any available criminal record information is accurate. The strongest predictor of support for expungement is a belief in redeemability. Policy Implications: There is a growing movement in the United States that seeks to curtail the effects of criminal records through their expungement. In recent years, most states have enacted bills creating, expanding, or streamlining criminal record relief. Public opinion is important in this context, because it can motivate or constrain reform efforts. Our findings show that, when the risk to public safety appears low, the American public favors providing second chances by using expungement to wipe clean the record of a criminal offense committed years previously. Further, knowledge about the public's