Racial Typification of Crime and Support for Punitive Measures

Abstract

This paper assesses whether support for harsh punitive policies toward crime is related to the racial typification of crime for a national random sample of households (N=885), surveyed in 2002. Results from OLS regression show that the racial typification of crime is a significant predictor of punitiveness, independent of the influence of racial prejudice, conservatism, crime salience, southern residence and other factors. This relationship is shown to be concentrated among whites who are either less prejudiced, not southern, conservative and for whom crime salience is low. The results broaden our understanding of the links between racial threat and social control, beyond those typically associated with racial composition of place. They also resonate important themes in what some have termed modern racism and what others have described as the politics of exclusion.

Predicting Punitive Attitudes: Racial-Animus towards New Immigrant and Aboriginal Minority Groups as a Mediating Agent upon Public Crime Concerns

“…Media coverage is a contributing factor to cotemporary negative perceptions of the Muslim community (Abdalla & Rane, 2008), and there is growing public association of "immigrant others" with crime (Unnever & Cullen, 2010a). Findings from the present study, although exploratory, lend support for the theory that crime has largely been typified as an "out group" phenomenon (Chiricos et al, 2004).…”

Conceal Carry and Race: A Test of Minority Threat Theory in Law Generation

“…Jacobs and Carmichael (2002) conducted a pooled time-series analysis of the death penalty and found significant support for both "threat" and "political" explanations for jurisdictional decisions concerning the death penalty. Chiricos, Welch, and Gertz (Chiricos et al 2004) examined whether support for harsh and strict policies toward crime was related to the racial typification of crime. They found that racial typification of crime was a significant predictor of policy punitiveness.…”

Political attitudes in a rapidly changing European landscape: methodological and substantive insights from the ESS-Netherlands panel component

“…Previous research confirms that perceptions of ethnic and immigrant populations as threats to social law and order excites support for harsher punitive policies (King & Wheelock, 2007). Studies demonstrate that ethnic typification of crime is a significant predictor of punitive attitudes (Chiricos, Welch, & Gertz, 2004;Pickett, Chiricos, Golden, & Gertz, 2012), and ethnic minorities are more severely punished than natives for criminal offenses they commit against the members of the dominant group (Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006). Consequently, we expect immigrant defendants to be evaluated as deserving harsher punishment for the criminal conducts than their native counterparts.…”