Retracted: Ethnic Threat and Social Control: Examining Public Support for Judicial Use of Ethnicity in Punishment*

Abstract

Research on social inequality in punishment has focused for a long time on the complex relationship among race, ethnicity, and criminal sentencing, with a particular interest in the theoretical importance that group threat plays in the exercise of social control in society. Prior research typically relies on aggregate measures of group threat and focuses on racial rather than on ethnic group composition. The current study uses data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents to investigate the influence of more proximate and diverse measures of ethnic group threat, examining public support for the judicial use of ethnic considerations in sentencing. Findings indicate that both aggregate and perceptual measures of threat influence popular support for ethnic disparity in punishment and that individual perceptions of criminal and economic threat are particularly important. Moreover, we find that perceived threat is conditioned by aggregate group threat contexts. *The authors would like to thank Ryan King for his helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper and Jason Bratton for his helpful technical assistance. Results from this work were presented at the

Controlling Other People's Children: Racialized Views of Delinquency and Whites’ Punitive Attitudes Toward Juvenile Offenders*

“…In addition to the lines of research discussed above, the role of perceptions about the ethnic makeup of delinquents in shaping public views about juvenile justice is a theme that bears greater attention. Two recent studies have shown that stereotypes associating Latinos with crime influence views about criminal punishments (Johnson et al, 2011; Welch et al, 2011). However, no research has examined whether the ethnic typification of delinquency is related to punitiveness toward juvenile offenders.…”

Neighborhood immigrant concentration and violent crime reporting to the police: A multilevel analysis of data from the National Crime Victimization Survey*

“…Scholars have long drawn general links between perceived social threats and the use of formal social control efforts, including the reporting of crimes to the police (Blalock, 1967;King & Wheelock, 2007;Stults & Baumer, 2007;Warner, 1992). In drawing on these ideas, scholars have recently suggested that punitive sentiment and the mobilization of law may be especially prominent in communities in which immigrants compose a larger and growing share (Johnson, Stewart, Pickett, & Gertz, 2011;Stewart, Martinez, Baumer, & Gertz, 2015;Stupi, Chiricos, & Gertz, 2016).…”

Retracted: A Legacy of Lynchings: Perceived Black Criminal Threat Among Whites

“…These studies, however, have not directly examined whites views of black criminality or, by extension, whether whites view blacks as posing a direct criminal threat to them. To address this research gap, we examine two dependent variables that accord with those used in prior studies that assess racial and ethnic threat processes (see, e.g., Barkan and Cohn , ; King and Wheelock ; Stults and Baumer ; Johnson et al ): Perceived black criminal threat and perceived black‐on‐white crime .…”