Belief in Redeemability and Punitive Public Opinion: “Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal” Revisited
| Author | Angela J. Thielo,Amanda Graham,Alexander L. Burton,Velmer S. Burton,Leah C. Butler,Francis T. Cullen |
| DOI | 10.1177/0093854820913585 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2020
Belief in RedeemaBility and Punitive
PuBlic OPiniOn
“Once a criminal, always a criminal” Revisited
ALExANDER L. BURTON
FRANCIS T. CULLEN
University of Cincinnati
VELMER S. BURTON, JR.
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
AMANDA GRAHAM
Georgia Southern University
LEAH C. BUTLER
University of Cincinnati
ANGELA J. THIELO
University of Louisville
In 2009, Maruna and King presented results from a British survey showing that the public’s belief in the redeemability of
people who committed offenses curbed their level of punitiveness. Based on a 2017 national survey in the United States
(n = 1,000), the current study confirms that redeemability is negatively related to punitive attitudes. In addition, the analy-
ses reveal that this belief predicts support for rehabilitation and specific inclusionary policies (i.e., ban-the-box in employ-
ment, expungement of criminal records, and voting rights for people with a felony conviction). Findings regarding measures
for punishment and rehabilitation were confirmed by a 2019 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey. These results suggest that
beliefs about capacity for change among people who committed offenses are key to understanding crime-control public
policy.
Keywords: attitudes; corrections; public opinion; rehabilitation; punitiveness; redeemability
Tracking public opinion since 1971, Enns (2016) has persuasively documented how the
growth in punitive attitudes contributed to the United States becoming the “incarcera-
tion nation.” The good news, he notes, is that for more than a decade, “public punitiveness
has been on the decline and politicians of both parties have noticed” (Enns, 2016, p. 164;
see also Pickett, 2019). In this context, policy shifts largely correspond to how people who
autHORS’ nOte: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alexander L. Burton,
School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210389, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0389; e-mail:
burtoar@mail.uc.edu.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2020, Vol. 47, No. 6, June 2020, 712 –732.
DOI: 10.1177/0093854820913585
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© 2020 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology
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Burton et al. / REDEEMABILITy AND PUNITIVE PUBLIC OPINION 713
committed offenses have been socially constructed as either redeemable or the intractable
dangerous “other.”
Thus, from the Progressive era into the 1970s, people who committed offenses were
portrayed as malleable and worthy of reform (Allen, 1981; Cullen & Gilbert, 1982;
Rothman, 1980). The invention of the correctional system—including probation, parole,
indeterminate sentencing, and the juvenile court—was predicated on the belief that the
criminogenic needs of these individuals could be treated successfully (Rothman, 1980).
The goal was “normalization,” with corrections aiming to enrich people who committed
offenses in the hope that they would be transformed and “and fit into the main organizing
institutions of social life” (Simon, 1993, p. 101). As Garland (2001, pp. 38–39) observes,
“penal-welfarism” prevailed in which the state was responsible “for the care of offenders
as well as their punishment and control.”
In the 1970s, however, the image of people who broke the law changed dramatically.
“The recurrent image of the offender,” observes Garland (2001), “ceased to be that of the
needy delinquent or the feckless misfit and became much more threatening—a matter of
career criminals, crackheads, thugs, and predators” (p. 102). In Thinking About Crime,
James Q. Wilson (1975) offered the stunning conclusion that “Wicked people exist. Nothing
avails except to set them apart from innocent people” (p. 235). Two decades later, DiIulio
(1995, p. 23) termed juveniles “super-predators,” describing them as “hardened” and
“remorseless” and as having “absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the
future.” Garland (2001, p. 136) captured these views under the umbrella of the “criminol-
ogy of the other,” in which “offenders are treated as a different species of threatening, vio-
lent individuals for whom we can have no sympathy and for whom there is no effective
help.” More recently, Simon (2014, p. 23) has documented the emergence in this area of the
“prevailing wisdom” that “most criminals have a high and unchanging potential for crimi-
nal activity.” This conception of such individuals was inextricably linked to the view that
keeping society risk-free required a policy of “total incapacitation.” “The politics of fear
that produced mass incarceration,” notes Simon (2014, p. 131), “relied on the image of the
prisoner as an unchanging lethal threat.”
These portrayals of individuals’ criminality as a stable or fixed entity sound increasingly
debatable—even if they were prevalent merely a decade ago. First, the “criminology of the
other” in which all people who break the law are seen as inherently and permanently risky
has been challenged by the “criminology of the diverse.” Essentially, politicians are now
disaggregating the criminal class. A favorite category “non-violent drug offenders” are
depicted as posing no danger and as candidates for prison release (see Obama, 2017). The
recent federal reform, The First Step Act of 2018, includes as a core component a “risk and
needs assessment system” to determine individuals’ risk of recidivating and to develop
individualized treatment plans (Office of the Attorney General, 2019, p. 1). Second, the
language of redemption is now common (see Cullen et al., 2020). Recall the “REDEEM
Act” proposed by Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul in 2015. Similarly, in the U.S.
House of Representatives, Doug Collins, a conservative Georgia Republican, offered the
Prison Reform and Redemption Act (Cohen, 2019). Most notably, at the White House sign-
ing ceremony for the First Step Act, President Trump commented that the “bipartisan bill
will make our communities safer and give individuals released from prison a second chance
at life after they have served their time, so important” (Schwartz, 2018). He then added the
714 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR
following: “Redemption is at the heart of the American Idea, and that’s what this is about”
(Schwartz, 2018).
The point is that public beliefs about people who committed offenses, especially about
redeemability, may be consequential when writ large—if they do, in fact, lead to reduced
punitiveness and greater support for rehabilitation and other inclusionary policies. Building
on the work of Maruna and King (2009), the current project has implications regarding this
possibility. A decade ago, Maruna and King (2009) advanced inquiry into the sources of
public punitiveness by introducing, measuring, and showing the consequences of belief in
individuals’ “redeemability”—that is, belief in “the impermanence of criminality” (p. 15).
Their work falls under the umbrella of attribution theory, which examines how people
explain behavior and, in turn, how these “attributions” make certain interventions seem
logical. Prior to their contribution, one aspect of attribution theory had shaped research:
whether the public perceived that the cause of crime was “dispositional” or “situational”
(see Heider, 1958). The dispositional perspective attributes crime (and other behaviors) to
individual traits or choices and tended to justify the use of punitive correctional policies,
whereas the situational perspective attributes crime to more malleable external or social
factors that legitimize rehabilitative responses (see, e.g., Cullen et al., 1985)—a connection
largely supported in the literature (Cochran et al., 2003; Falco & Turner, 2014; Maruna and
King, 2009; Pickett & Baker, 2014; Unnever et al., 2010).
Maruna and King (2009, p. 9) understood, however, that attribution theory in social psy-
chology had evolved to incorporate additional cognitive dimensions, including “stability/
instability” (Weary, 1984; Weiner, 2010). In a related development, other social psycholo-
gists—led most notably by Carol Dweck—framed the same issue in terms of the “implicit”
theories people held about human attributes, distinguishing between “entity” theory that saw
traits as fixed and “incremental theory” that saw traits as malleable. As Levy et al. (1998)
note, “a fixed versus a malleable view of traits may set up a framework for understanding
social information and social judgments” (p. 1422). In an important innovation, Maruna and
King (2009, p. 9) called for the application of this reasoning to the study of public opinion
about people who committed offenses:
This measure asks how permanent or transient members of the public feel the causes of
criminality to be. That is, regardless of the origins of criminal behavior (situational or
dispositional), do they believe that “once a criminal, always a criminal” or do they believe that
even the most persistent offenders can redeem themselves and turn their lives around.
Maruna and King (2009, p. 9) observed that the public likely has “divergent views on this
key issue,” and that such thinking about such individuals has potential consequences (see
also Plaks et al., 2009). They hypothesized that those who believed that criminality was a
stable, fixed trait—“once a criminal, always a criminal”—would endorse more punitive
correctional policies....
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