The public sense of justice in Scandinavia: A study of attitudes towards punishments

Abstract

Crime policy is increasingly legitimized by reference to the public sense of justice. A research project has therefore been conducted in all five Scandinavian countries in order to examine the public's views on punishment. These views have been examined by means of simple questions in telephone interviews, by vignettes in postal questionnaires, and by focus groups having seen a film of a mock trial. The results show that, when asked simple questions, the public want stiffer sentences. In their assessments of the vignette crimes, the public demands on average lower prison sentences than judges, and this tendency becomes stronger in the focus group study. The propensities towards punitiveness seem to diminish with more information and increasing proximity to the parties involved.

Knowledge, punitive attitudes and punitive gap: Finnish findings

“…This result confirms many previous observations (see e.g. Balvig et al 2015;Roberts and Hough 2011), so it does not merit further attention here. Our second question was about information included in case vignettes and its connection to sentence decisions.…”

“…The impact of education on mitigating punitive attitudes also seems to be connected to the fact that people generally have quite poor knowledge about crime and the workings of the criminal justice system . Many studies have shown that the punitive attitudes of people decrease in severity the more they know about how the criminal justice system operates and about the alternatives for punishment (Balvig et al 2015;Gelb 2008;Roberts et al 2012). One possible reason for this is that the key source of information about such matters for ordinary people is the media, which often highlights exceptionally serious crime cases and in a way that prejudges the punishments handed out for crimes (Roberts and Doob 1990).…”

“…Moreover, in the case of one type of crime-fraud-laypeople tended to give an even more lenient sentence than professional judges (Kuhn 2002). Research carried out in the Nordic countries that applied the focus-group method addition to the vignette method found that by providing detailed information, the punitive gap could be bridged (Balvig et al 2015).…”

“…Researchers often use sentence decisions to determine laypeople's punitive attitudes (see e.g. Balvig et al 2015;Roberts et al 2012). It is possible, even probable, that someone with a strong punitive attitude will impose tougher punishments in a research situation than someone with a more liberal attitude towards punishment in principle.…”

“…It has been found that the level of punitive reactions of people falls when a concrete criminal case vignette is presented for them and they are asked to give an appropriate sentence decision about it (see e.g. Balvig et al 2015). In this case, the information included in the vignettes and the given sentence options appear to reduce the punitive tendency.…”