D. Garth Taylor

Salience of Crime and Support for Harsher Criminal Sanctions

This paper examines the relation between the salience of crime and support for harsher legal sanctions (capital punishment, harsher courts) in American public opinion. Many of the “simple theories” of effect are not supported. People who are more afraid or who have been victimized do not necessarily favor harsher sanctions. At the ecological level, in environments which are characterized by higher rates of crime and greater fear of crime, respondents do not express a greater demand for harsher sanctions. However, public opinion and the “ideology” of crime and punishment are much more consistent in high risk areas.

The Accuracy of Respondent-Coded Occupation

This study reports results from a methodological experiment conducted in a national survey to test the accuracy of respondent-coded occupation. For most uses, we conclude that such measures are sufficiently precise. There are, however, some systematic sources of error which the investigator should be aware of. D. Garth Taylor is a Study Director at the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. POQ 40 (1976) 245-255 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.148 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 04:21:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

On Democracy and School Integration

It is offensive to American ideals that a person, because of his or her birth, should be assigned to a slum school with antique facilities, an atmosphere of violence, a weak academic program, and a teaching force that has lost all hope. It is offensive whether the reason for the assignment is that the person is Black, or that the mother of the family must support four children without the help of the father, or that the family recently emigrated from a peasant background and speaks broken English. But it is also offensive if the reason for assignment to the slum school is to achieve racial balance, if being born in a suburb would have kept the student from being so assigned. The difference is that, in some circumstances, considerations of equal treatment may balance that offensiveness for the judiciary that must remedy the effects of segregation.