ABSTRACT"Get tough" control policies in the United States are often portrayed as the reflection of the public's will: Americans are punitive and want offenders locked up. Research from the past decade both reinforces and challenges this assessment. The public clearly accepts, if not prefers, a range of punitive policies (e.g., capital punishment, three-strikes-andyou're-out laws, imprisonment). But support for get-tough policies is "mushy." Thus citizens may be willing to substitute a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for the death penalty. Especially when nonviolent offenders are involved, there is substantial support for intermediate sanctions and for restorative justice. Despite three decades of criticism, rehabilitation-particularly for the young-remains an integral part of Americans' correctional philosophy. There is also widespread support for early intervention programs. In the end, the public shows a tendency to be punitive and progressive, wishing the correctional system to achieve the diverse missions of doing justice, protecting public safety, and reforming the wayward.In the not-too-distant past, rates of imprisonment were stable and showed no hint of escalating (Blumstein and Cohen Today, however, much has changed-so much so that the policy and ideological landscape of that previous era is unrecognizable. "Get tough" thinking and policies have replaced calls for more humanistic correctional practices, and their dominance appears unassailable. Virtually all contemporary commentaries on correctional policy begin, almost ritualistically, by chronicling-and most often decrying-the seemingly endless roster of policies designed in recent years to inflict increasing amounts of pain on offenders (Clear 1994): prison populations rising sixfold in a quarter century from 200,000 to over 1.2 million; the spread of mandatory prison sentences; the implementation of draconian drug laws that snare big and little "fishes" alike; the passage of three-strikes-and-you're-out statutes; the renewed use of the death penalty; attempts to reduce inmates' amenities, from weight lifting and television to support for college education; the return of chain gangs; and the invention of "scared straight" programs and boot camps.We have moved, in short, from a time in which punishment and prison were unfashionable to a time in which punishment dominates policy discussions and the prison is embraced as the linchpin of the nation's response to crime. But why has this striking shift occurred? The sources of this transformation in thinking and policy are complex (Beckett 1997), but a commonsense, parsimonious explanation for harsher penalties is frequently offered: punitive policies simply reflect what the public wants. Fed up with intractable crime rates-fed up with coddled offenders victimizing them, people they know, and people they hear about-citizens collectively have made the rational assessment that more offenders should be locked up for longer periods (cf. Beckett 1997; Dilulio 1997). In this scenario, then, the mov...

Although research typically has failed to establish a relationship between religious affiliation and correctional attitudes, recent assessments have revealed that fundamentalist Christians tend to be more punitive than are nonfundamentalists. These studies have advanced our understanding considerably, but their conceptualization of religion and correctional attitudes has been limited. Using a statewide survey, the present study demonstrates that compassionate as well as fundamentalist aspects of religious beliefs are related to public correctional preferences. Further, our results reveal that religion influences support for rehabilitation as well as punitiveness. These findings suggest the need for scholars to think more broadly about the role of religion in criminology.David Garland (1990:203) recently observed that "throughout the history of penal practice religion has been a major force in shaping the ways in which offenders are dealt with." Despite this long tradition, little research has seriously explored the relationship between religious views and correctional attitudes. Most of the research that has been conducted on public attitudes toward justice policies either failed to consider religion altogether or divided respondents into broad categories of affiliation, typically producing null relationships. In contrast, a handful of recent studies have examined the issue more closely, revealing greater punitiveness ~~

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In the recent movement to pass “three-strikes-and-you're-out” laws, policymakers often cite opinion polls that ostensibly show widespread public support for these initiatives. Our community survey, however, reveals that support for three-strikes laws is high when citizens are asked broad single-item questions, but diminishes greatly when citizens are presented with specific situations covered under the law. Further, the public appears willing to make exceptions to three-strikes laws. Taken together, these findings suggest that citizens would endorse three-strikes policies that focus on only the most serious offenders and that allow for flexible application.