Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• King, Anna
• Maruna, Shadd

Titel

Is a conservative just a liberal who has been mugged?: Exploring the origins of punitive views

Ist Teil von

• Punishment & society, 2009-04, Vol.11 (2), p.147-169

Ort / Verlag

London, England: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• As in the adage that `a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged', many presume that punitive public attitudes are derived from the direct experience of crime and victimization. People become `fed up' with criminality and seek to strike back at lawbreakers. Social theories of punitiveness, on the other hand, typically portray punitiveness as a form of scape-goating in which offenders are just a stand-in population, masking more abstract anxieties. This survey was designed to explore both of these hypotheses with a sample (N = 940) of the British public. A multivariate analysis of survey responses finds that factors such as concerns about the economy and the state of `the youth today' account for a substantial proportion of the effect of actual crime concerns on punitiveness. Crime-related factors, such as victimization experiences or anxieties about crime, on the other hand, do not appear to be strong predictors of punitiveness in this sample.