Julian V. Roberts

News media influences on public views of sentencing

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.

Sentencing Trends in Britain Public Knowledge and Public Opinion

Research on public opinion over the past three decades has consistently established that the British public are critical of sentencers, and that this criticism exists independent of crime trends and even dramatic changes in criminal justice policies. This finding points to the possibilities that the findings are an artefact of the approach used by these surveys or that public opinion is formed in ignorance of actual practice. The 1996 British Crime Survey (BCS) contained a section of questions designed to test these hypotheses. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their knowledge of, as well as attitudes towards, sentencing practice and sentencers. Results indicate that judges received significantly more negative evaluations than any other group of criminal justice professionals. The public systematically under-estimate the severity of sentencing patterns, and this is significantly related to attitudes to sentencers. When asked to provide a sentence in a specific case of burglary, members of the public favoured sentences that were on balance little different from, and if anything more lenient than, current sentencing practice. Discussion focuses on the policy implications of these findings, as well as their relation to research in other jurisdictions.

Restorative Sentencing: Exploring the Views of the Public

Within the past decade, restorative justice has emerged as a truly global phenomenon. Although retributive justice has dominated the penal landscape, more recently, restorative principles at sentencing have attracted increased attention. Restorative sentencing emphasizes the importance of compensation and reconciliation between victims and offenders and pays less attention to establishing proportionality between the seriousness of the offense and the severity of the sentence imposed. Although voluminous (and proliferating), the scholarly literature on restorative justice has to date neglected one critical issue: public opinion with respect to this justice paradigm. Public opinion researchers too, have generally overlooked this topic. The goal of this paper is to determine which elements of the new paradigm generate public approval, and which features are likely to encounter or provoke public opposition, drawing upon related international research published in English over the past 20 years (1982–2002). The review reveals widespread support for “restorative” sentencing options, such as community service, compensation, and restitution, particularly when applied to young offenders. However, it also seems clear that public support for these alternatives to punitive sentencing options declines as the seriousness of the offence increases, suggesting strong public adherence to the retributive principle of proportionality in sentencing.

Not everyone strongly supports the death penalty: Assessing weakly-held attitudes about capital punishment

Polls exploring attitudes toward the death penalty typically impose a simple, dichotomous response structure: respondents are asked whether or not they support or oppose capital punishment. This polling strategy deprives respondents of expressing an indication of the strength of their opinions. When asked whether they support (or oppose) the death penalty “strongly” or “not strongly,” significant proportions of respondents select the latter category. This suggests that many proponents and opponents of the death penalty have weakly-held views regarding the issue. These respondents are of great interest because they are the individuals most likely to change their views. This article analyzes responses to two national surveys in order to explore the variables that differentiate respondents with strongly-held and weakly-held views. A theoretical account is offered to explain why some people have weakly-held views on this critical social issue.

Public Opinion and Youth Justice

Surveys conducted over the past twenty years in several English-speaking countries reveal that most members of the public subscribe to a number of misperceptions about juvenile crime and justice. Regardless of actual trends, significant majorities believe youth crime to be increasing, and most people have quite negative views of youth courts. The public display considerable ambivalence with respect to juvenile justice. While strong majorities favor punishing violent juveniles with the same severity as adults, there has always been considerable support for rehabilitation. There is a clear consensus among scholars that public concern about youth crime, particularly violent crime, has been a driving force behind reforms that facilitated the transfer of accused juveniles to adult criminal court and made penalties harsher for offenders sentenced in youth court.

Public Opinion and Mandatory Sentencing A Review of International Findings

All Western nations have passed mandatory sentencing legislation that removes or greatly curtails judicial discretion. These mandatory sentencing laws have proliferated in recent years with predictable consequences for prison populations. A response to public demand for more severe sentencing is one of the justifications for mandatory sentences of imprisonment. In addition, politicians use mandatory sentencing legislation to enhance their standing in the eyes of the public. Politicians appear to assume that the public is strongly supportive of these laws, though scientifically valid surveys are never cited to support these assumptions. This article reviews the international findings from surveys that reveal that the public is deeply divided about mandatory sentencing. Part of the reason for this is that there is more support for proportional sentencing than for utilitarian goals, such as deterrence or incapacitation. In addition, survey data suggest that the electoral advantage of promoting these laws has been considerably overstated.

Race, Ethnicity, and Criminal Justice in Canada

The relationship between crime and race or ethnicity has important implications for Canada. The constitution affirms the countrys multicultural heritage. As in other Western nations, certain minorities are overrepresented in the prison population. Aboriginal and black offenders account for a disproportionate number of admissions. There has not been much research on why such disproportions exist, except concerning Aboriginal Canadians. Canada is not immune to problems of discrimination. Compared with whites, black accuseds are significantly more likely to be denied pretrial release on bail and, for certain offenses, to be incarcerated.

Changing public attitudes towards corporal punishment: the effects of statutory reform in Sweden

OBJECTIVE One justification for a statutory ban on physical punishment is that passage of such legislation changes public attitudes towards the use of this form of parental discipline. The experience in Sweden is often cited as an example of legislation which changed public opinion. The aim of this brief article is to review the public opinion findings in Sweden in order to evaluate in greater detail the impact of changing the law. METHOD A search was conducted to generate all published and publicly-available quantitative surveys of the public in Sweden and elsewhere. RESULTS The results of time-series analysis of the data are clear. The 1979 legal reform in Sweden did not reduce the level of public support for parental use of corporal punishment as a means of disciplining children. Support for physical punishment began declining years before the reform was passed and the decline was in no way accelerated by the law reform. Changes in public opinion may have generated the legal reform, but the reverse is not true. Data from other jurisdictions also support the view that there is no relationship between the status of the law and the nature of public views with regard to corporal punishment. This result is consistent with analyses of the effects of legal reforms in other areas. CONCLUSIONS The Swedish ban on corporal punishment did not affect public attitudes. Changing public views requires other initiatives.

Communication in Sentencing: Exploring the Expressive Function of Victim Impact Statements

The role of the victim in the sentencing process continues to generate controversy among scholars and practitioners across many jurisdictions. In this article we address some of the persistent objections to allowing victim input into sentencing. By placing the debate on victim input within its historical context, we suggest that the movement to provide victims with a voice has been derailed, as the communicative model of victim input — originally envisioned by the reform movement as its justification — was replaced by a model that stresses the impact of VIS on sentencing. We argue that much of the lingering opposition to victim input rights has been animated by this ‘impact’ model, which we argue is theoretically misconceived, empirically unsupported and at odds with major sentencing aims. We reintroduce the communicative model, which reflects the original intent and purpose of the victim reform concerning input, elaborating on its advantages for victims and offenders. We then provide two examples from the field to illustrate the therapeutic benefits of the model for both victims and offenders. We conclude with a call to reassess current theory and practice regarding victim integration in sentencing and offer some policy recommendations regarding the optimal way to integrate the voice of the victim at sentencing.

Sexual Homicide in Canada: A Descriptive Analysis

Several cases of sexual homicide over the past few years have generated widespread professional and public interest in the subject. At the same time, these incidents have provoked the federal government into introducing far-reaching proposals to give correctional authorities additional powers to detain inmates considered dangerous. Little quantitative research has addressed the issue of sexual homicide in Canada. In this article, the results of an analysis of a homicide data-base are presented. The focus is upon cases of homicide occurring during the commission of a sexual offence. This is the Criminal Code definition of sexual homicide. The results indicated that over the period 1974-1986, sexual homicides accounted for 4% of all homicides recorded by the police. There has been no change in the incidence of sexual homicide in recent years. However, the narrow definition of sexual homicide employed by Statistics Canada, along with the fact that a substantial percentage of homicides were of unknown motive, leads us to believe that the incidence of this crime is higher than the approximately 20 cases recorded annually in the homicide data-base. There has been a shift in the age profile of victims: almost half the victims in the period 1974-1976 were under 21. In the period 1961-1970, only 20% of victims were in this age category. The incidence of sexual homicide involving strangers is significantly higher than the incidence of homicide in general involving strangers. These and other results are discussed, and recommendations are made for future research in the area.