Public Opinion and the Politics of Criminal Justice Policy Making: Reasons for Optimism, Pessimism, and Uncertainty

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12185
• Author: Kevin H. Wozniak
• Published date: 01 February 2016
• Date: 01 February 2016

POLICY ESSAY

REHABILITATION IN A RED STATE

Public Opinion and the Politics of Criminal

Justice Policy Making: Reasons for

Optimism, Pessimism, and Uncertainty

Kevin H. Wozniak

University of Massachusetts—Boston

Scholars have long discussed the fact that political forces affect criminal justice policy

and practice in the United States. For example, numerous empirical studies have

found that political factors, such as partisan control of the legislature and/or gov-

ernor’s office and the political ideology of a state’s citizens, exert significant effects on the

incarceration rate even when holding the crime rate constant (Jacobs and Carmichael, 2001;

Jacobs and Helms, 1996; Smith, 2004; Yates and Fording, 2005). Recently, the Committee

on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration in the United Statesconcluded

that, “the single best proximate explanation of the rise in incarceration is not rising crime

rates, but the policy choices made by legislators to greatly increase the use of imprisonment

as a response to crime” (National Research Council, 2014: 3).

Theorists believe that public opinion shapes criminal justice policy making in im-

portant ways. With different nuances, Savelsberg (1994), Garland (2001), Tonry (2004),

and Simon (2007) each posited that America’s political system of democracy and direct

electoral accountability formed a context in which punitive public sentiment supported the

sentencing policies that undergird mass incarceration. Recent time-series analyses have in-

dicated that a significant relationship between punitive public opinion and policy outcomes

does exist (Enns, 2014; Nicholson-Crotty, Peterson, and Ramirez, 2009), but scholars have

continued to debate temporal order and the precise nature of the relationship between elite

and public opinion (Frost, 2010). Most politicians have claimed that they simply responded

to their constituents’ demands for tough punishment when they supported longer, harsher

sentences, but some scholars have argued that politicians engaged in “penal populism”

by stoking public fear of crime and fueling punitive policy attitudes that might not have

Direct correspondence to Kevin H. Wozniak, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of

Massachusetts—Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125-3393 (e-mail: kevin.wozniak@umb.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12185 C2016 American Society of Criminology 179

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 1