Gendered views on parole: exploring how emotion and emotion management help to explain gender differences in the Australian public’s views on parole

Abstract

Several studies have explored the gender gap in various aspects of the public’s criminal justice attitudes. However, no studies to date have examined gender differences in public support or opposition to parole as their focal interest. Such research is necessary given the recent controversy surrounding parole in Australia (and internationally), as well as the growing involvement of women in all aspects of criminal justice decision-making, including as parole board members. Although research tends to show that women hold less punitive views toward offenders than men and are more supportive of treatment-based approaches, there is some evidence to suggest that the reverse may be true when it comes to releasing prisoners on parole. Here, women are seemingly less supportive than men of early release mechanisms. However, whether this is true in the Australian context, and if so, the reasons underlying this gender gap, is not yet known. There is some indication, though, that differing emotional dispositions and reactions may lead to differences in men’s and women’s policy preferences. Exploring the interplay between gender and emotion, then, may provide a clearer understanding of gender differences in public punitiveness, including public views on parole.  This dissertation examines how emotions intersect with men’s and women’s tolerance for the penal process of parole using an explanatory mixed-methods research design. This design involves two sequential phases of data collection and analysis. First, a quantitative analysis of survey data collected from 1,079 men and women is conducted to establish whether there is a gender gap in parole support in Australia. This analysis also investigates whether the gender gap, if found, can be explained by demographic factors other than gender or by variables found by previous research to be associated with people’s attitudes toward offenders more broadly.In the second research phase, I use a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews to explore the affective experiences and behaviour of Australian men and women in response to a parole crime vignette. Here, I explore how emotions like fear, anger, and empathy play into men’s and women’s views on parole and their decision to grant or refuse parole for a hypothetical offender. I am also interested in how emotions are part of ‘doing gender’ in a criminal justice context. The conceptual framework underpinning this research draws from Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theory of emotion management and its key concepts of gendered feeling rules and emotion management. Thus, while I adopt a binary view of gender in the quantitative analysis, for this second part of my study I take a social constructionist view of gender as a type of performance, which allows me to explore how men and women enact their gendered identity through emotion in a hypothetical parole context. I take a similar view of emotion, whereby I conceptualise emotions as physiological, but also culturally and context dependent.The results of the quantitative analysis confirm the existence of a gender gap in parole attitudes in Australia, with women having greater odds than men of holding non-supportive views toward releasing prisoners on parole. The results also indicate that women have greater odds of taking a neutral view on parole, rather than supporting it. Finally, the analysis returned some unexpected results, with a moderation analysis showing that it was women who were the least fearful and the least punitive who had the greatest odds of opposing parole. This led me to question the role of emotions in contributing to the gender gap in parole support, which I explored in phase 2.The findings of the qualitative analysis showed that emotions of fear, anger, and empathy are important in shaping people’s views on parole. The analysis also showed that while some men and women conformed to prevailing gendered feeling rules while enacting their gendered identities, others resisted emotion norms by directly and openly expressing feelings not usually associated with their gender. Some women, for example, resisted normative ideas about femininity and gendered feeling rules by describing the anger they experienced with respect to criminal justice issues. On the other hand, many men expressed, without reservation, feelings of empathy and the influence of these feelings on their parole decision. Thus, I argue that while men’s and women’s affective experiences and behaviour are governed in some ways by the gendered feeling rules that are customarily observed in other social contexts, a criminal justice context may evoke some unique feeling rules. Further, because different social contexts may allow or require individuals to express emotions that do not necessarily conform with the feeling rules associated with their gender, I argue that the emotions expressed by men and women in a hypothetical parole context may conflict with traditional ideas about appropriately masculine and feminine displays of emotion.From the findings of these two studies, I conclude that while a gender gap in parole attitudes in Australia does exist, one must look further than the results of a quantitative survey to understand the complex interplay of gender, emotion and emotion management that underlies those gender differences.