Effects of Legal Education and Work Experience on Perceptions of Crime Seriousness

And justice for all? Investigators’ perceptions of punishment for fraud perpetrators

“…Overall a high degree of consensus is revealed between perceptions of the general public and those who work within the criminal justice system. McCleary et al [18] found that their criminal justice respondents rated seriousness in terms of many more dimensions than did their sample of citizens but attribute the difference in perceptions to the formal legal education of the criminal justice bureaucrats. Police investigators were found to perceive higher seriousness ratings than did police chiefs and the general public but that the average rankings of offenses were overall similar [23,24].…”

“…1 Extant research on the perceptions of crime and punishment literature have further extended the knowledge base by widening the scope of crimes to include whitecollar and corporate violations [9-11, 27, 29, 32]. In addition to drawing samples from the general population [21,31], this line of work has extended the more general research base to include a range of sampling frames including criminal justice bureaucrats [18], police officers [23,24], and local prosecutors [3]. Although it is too early to draw any definitive summary conclusion about perceptions of crime and punishment among such crime types, this line of work tends to also suggest that representative samples do not have a complete understanding of the nature of such crimes, nor adequately understand the deterrence and punishment process regarding white-collar violations.…”

Public perceptions of crime seriousness in Israel:

“…Unlike the selected sampling of specific public groups (e.g., Corbett and Simon, 1991;McCleary et al, 1981;Sellin and Wolfgang, 1964), this study focused on a random sample of the adult population in Israel ðn ¼ 483Þ: The most recent Israeli telephone directories (2000), covering all geographical regions provided the sampling framework, and the application of a systematic random sampling method assured equal probability of inclusion of all households listed. 3 Due to its minority status in the Israeli population, the sampling included disproportionate stratified random sampling of the Ethiopian group in order to increase its weight in the sample.…”

“…Respondents were requested to evaluate 30 hypothetical crime scenarios representing various criminal offenses scenarios by choosing one value on a Likert scale from 1=''Not serious at all'' to 9=''Very serious'' (see Cullen et al, 1985;McCleary et al, 1981; for advantages of this method in comparison with the magnitude approach, see Levi and Jones, 1985;Miethe, 1986;O'Connell and Whelan, 1996). Thus, respondents' subjective perceptions of the seriousness of the scenarios constituted the dependent variables.…”

“…For within-society studies, seeCorbett and Simon (1991),Cullen et al (1982),Levi and Jones (1985),McCleary et al (1981),Rossi et al (1974),Sellin and Wolfgang (1964). For between-society studies, seeEvans and Scott (1984),Newman (1976), van Dijk and vanKesteren (1996).…”