News media influences on public views of sentencing.

Abstract

Opinion polls in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere suggest that most members of the public would like their criminal courts to be harsher. Does media coverage of criminal sentencing contribute to a preference for harsher sentencing? Most people derive their information about sentencing from the news media, and content analyses of news stories in Canada and the United States demonstrate that crimes of violence and sentences of imprisonment are overrepresented. Moreover, the news media provide little systematic information about the sentencing process or its underlying principles. This article reports the results of three studies examining the effects of media coverage on public opinion about sentencing. Subjects who read actual newspaper stories about sentencing that appeared in Canadian newspapers rated most reported sentences as too lenient. However, the specific account they read influenced their leniency judgments. Furthermore, in one experiment, participants assigned to read a newspaper account of a sentencing decision supported harsher sentences than participants who read a summary of actual court documents from the sentencing hearing. * The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Valerie Hans and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The research reported in this article was carried out under contract with the Department of Justice, Canada, in some instances, and as part of the :research program of the Canadian Sentencing Commission in others. Some of this research is ,

The portrayal of obesity in U.K. national newspapers.

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The animal in you: Animalistic descriptions of a violent crime increase punishment of perpetrator

“…However, even if these effects are limited to public perceptions based on media reports, they still have important implications for criminal justice. Media reports influence legal proceedings and most people rely on the media for information about criminal justice (Hans & Dee, 1991;Robbennolt & Studebaker, 2003;Roberts & Doob, 1990). Further, given that animalistic descriptions of crime lead to a greater perceived risk of recidivism and more desire for custodial sentences, people exposed to these descriptions through the media may vote for harsher policies to address crime.…”

Knowledge, punitive attitudes and punitive gap: Finnish findings

“…Many studies have shown that the punitive attitudes of people decrease in severity the more they know about how the criminal justice system operates and about the alternatives for punishment (Balvig et al 2015;Gelb 2008;Roberts et al 2012). One possible reason for this is that the key source of information about such matters for ordinary people is the media, which often highlights exceptionally serious crime cases and in a way that prejudges the punishments handed out for crimes (Roberts and Doob 1990). It can also be assumed that the significance of the media as an information source regarding crime and punishment is heightened among those who are less educated (Rosenberger and Callanan 2011).…”