Public Support for Emergency Shelter Housing Interventions Concerning Stigmatized Populations

• Author: Jason Rydberg,Kelly M. Socia,Christopher P. Dum
• Date: 01 August 2017
• Published date: 01 August 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12311

RESEARCH ARTICLE

EMERGENCY SHELTER HOUSING

INTERVENTIONS

Public Support for Emergency Shelter

Housing Interventions Concerning

Stigmatized Populations

Results From a Factorial Survey

Christopher P. Dum

Kent State University

Kelly M. Socia

Jason Rydberg

University of Massachusetts—Lowell

Research Summary

We examine citizen decision-making in the context of providing access to safe housing

to different noncriminal and criminal populations. More than 4,000 national online

survey respondents considered different “emergencyhousing policy” scenarios that would

affect the housing conditions of one of five randomly assigned populations of varying

stigma (three noncriminal, two criminal). We find that the criminal populations had

the least support for helpful housing policies and the most support for harmful housing

policies. Furthermore, compared with a “nocost” policy, average support levels decreased

when it increased taxes for the respondent.

Policy Implications

Citizens seem more willing to subject criminal populations to poor and unsafe hous-

ing conditions compared with noncriminal populations. Thus, citizen support may

The authors would like to thank Senior Guest Editor Eric Grommon, William Bales, Justin Pickett, Eric Baumer,

Greg Gibson, Brooke Long, Fritz Yarrison, and multiple anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on

earlier versions of this article. Direct correspondence to Christopher P. Dum, Department of Sociology, Kent

State University, 323 Merrill Hall, Kent, OH 44242–0001 (e-mail: cdum@kent.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12311 C2017 American Society of Criminology 835

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 3

Research Article Emergency Shelter Housing Interventions

be higher when policies are pitched in ways that do not imply specifically helping

ex-offenders, when they do not involve a personal sacrifice through increased taxes,

and when they do not involve “in-my-backyard” proposals. For example, a housing

policy pitched as aiding the area’s homeless (ex-offenders included) would likely see

more support than one that identifies ex-offenders (and particularly sex offenders) as

the population being targeted for help, or that identifies a specific neighborhood as a

potential housing facility location.

Keywords

housing, public opinion, sex offenders, reentry, stigma, NIMBY

Homelessness is a social problem that touches the lives of many individuals.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in

January 2015, there were 564,708 homeless people in America on a given

night (Henry, Shivji, de Sousa, and Cohen, 2015). Although polices that attempt to solve

homelessness operate in many political arenas, the relationship between homelessness and

the criminal justice system deserves special attention.

It is well documented that finding suitable housing is the key to successful prison reentry

(Petersilia,2003) and that homelessness among ex-prisoners is a sizable problem. Indeed, the

Urban Institute estimates that a tenth of released prisoners experience homelessness (Roman

and Travis, 2004), which is similar to Metraux and Culhane’s (2004) estimate that in the

first 2 years of their release, 11.4% of returning prisoners experience homelessness. Given

national estimates of homelessness in the general population of 18 per 10,000 (National

Alliance to End Homelessness, 2015), this suggests that returning prisoners are more

than 50 times as likely to experience homelessness compared with the general population.

Furthermore, there is considerable overlap between shelter use and criminal justice system

contact (Metraux and Culhane, 2006), and shelter use during reentry is associated with

recidivism (Metraux and Culhane, 2004).

Although many factors limit an ex-offender’s ability to find suitable housing (e.g., lack

of friends and family and parole conditions), citizen pushback can play a significant role

in limiting these housing options (see Garland, Wodahl, and Saxon, 2014; Stojkovic and

Farkas, 2013). This pushback, also known as not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY), is fueled by

the stigma applied to ex-offenders.

Stigma has been conceptualized in a variety of ways, but one of the most common

definitions came from Erving Goffman, who wrote that stigma is “an attribute that is

deeply discrediting” (1963: 3). Sociologists Link and Phelan (2001) argued that those

who experience stigma suffer status loss and discrimination to the point where their life

chances (e.g., employment, social capital, well-being, and access to housing) are affected in

important ways.

836 Criminology & Public Policy

Dum, Socia, and Rydberg

The results of criminological research demonstrate that stigma affects the housing

opportunities of many types of offenders. For example, citizen opposition has frequently

forced sex offenders (SOs) to live in neighborhoods considered to be socially disorganized

and with few social supports (e.g., Hughes and Burchfield, 2008; Hughes and Kadleck,

2008; Socia and Stamatel, 2011; Tewksbury and Mustaine, 2006, 2008). Researchers have

found that citizens also strongly oppose housing drug and violent offenders in their cities

and neighborhoods (Garland, Wodahl, and Schuhmann, 2013). Furthermore, landlords

are hesitant to rent to those with criminal records (Israelsen-Hartley, 2008). Because of the

public’sNIMBY attitude, criminal justice and social welfare agencies often place ex-prisoners

in housing facilities or shelters (Roman and Travis, 2004).

Nevertheless, these housing solutions are far from ideal. The results of ethnographic

research reveal that ex-prisoners are placed in shelters and buildings that suffer from

dangerous illegal building code violations (Dum, 2016). The experience of living in

these conditions negatively impacts ex-prisoner’s feelings of self-worth, builds mistrust in

government, and creates intense psychological stress (Dum, 2016). These effects have the

potential to increase the risk of recidivism and endanger public safety. Additionally, unsta-

ble and temporary housing has been linked by researchers to higher recidivism rates for

ex-prisoners (Roman and Travis, 2004).

Despite these outcomes from research on public attitudes toward housing ex-offenders,

it is unclear how the public would feel about policies that expose (or do not expose)

different types of ex-offenders to particular housing conditions that endanger their mental

and physical well-being. This issue is important to explore, given that the media exposure

of the dangerous conditions that returning prisoners live in (e.g., Zou and Miller, 2015)

could drive local policy makers to address them. Nevertheless, the willingness to act may be

constrained by negative public perceptions. Researchers have shown that public opinion can

have significant impact on public policy (Burstein, 2003) and that government responds

to the desires of its citizens concerning criminal justice issues (Nicholson-Crotty, Peterson,

and Ramirez, 2009). If citizens were asked to weigh in on policies that could improve the

housing situations of ex-offenders, how would the stigma applied to this population affect

their decision making?

In the current study,we examine this question of criminal justice stigma and life chances

by using national public opinion data gathered from an online panel survey.We then exam-

ine responses to a series of experimental vignettes that were used to assess citizen support for

policies that affect the living conditions of a motel serving as a social services emergency shel-

ter.By manipulating the population of the shelter to represent social groups of varying stigma

(e.g., homeless families, drug offenders, and SOs), we also examine how the stigma attached

to different types of offenders and nonoffenders affects their life chances and public support

for policy implementations. Next, we address the public opinion research on ex-offenders

and nonoffenders, our data and methods, and the findings of this study. We conclude with

a discussion of the implications for research, public policy, and community safety.

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