Punitive Attitudes toward Criminals: Racial Consensus or Racial Conflict?

Abstract

A sizeable body of literature has found a surprising amount of agreement among racial and other demographic subgroups on punitive attitudes toward criminals. This consensus has been widely interpreted as evidence for functionalist views of crime and society. Challenging this interpretation, this paper argues that the similar attitudes between the races on punitiveness may in fact mask underlying hostilities and conflicting interests. Analyzing data from the 1987 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Survey, we find that the punitive attitudes of whites toward criminals are based partly on racial prejudice, while those of blacks are associated with their fear of crime. These results suggest that the consensus found in many previous studies between whites and blacks on punitiveness toward criminals may be apparent rather than real, and that their attitudes toward punitiveness reflect their disparate positions in the social and economic orders.