To Punish or Not to Punish—That Is the Question

Abstract

Attitudes toward punishment have long been of interest to policymakers, researchers, and criminal justice practitioners. The current study examined the relationship between academic education in criminology and attitudes toward punishment among 477 undergraduate students in three subgroups: police officers, correctional officers, and criminology students who were not employed by the criminal justice system (CJS). Our main findings concluded that (a) punitive attitudes of the correctional officers and police officers at the beginning of their academic studies were harsher than those of the criminology and criminal justice students who were not employed by the CJS, (b) punitive attitudes of the correctional officers at the end of their academic studies were less severe than their first-year counterparts, (c) fear of crime was higher among women than among men, and (d) the strongest predictor of punitive attitudes was a firm belief in the principles of the classical and labeling theories (beyond group). Implications of these results are discussed.

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

“…Instead, therefore, a more substantive limitation regards the inability to specify which features of the play produced the observed effects; for example, it is possible that the same effects would have been observed after presenting any explanation of teenage behavior that induced greater empathy, perspective-taking, awareness or memory of adolescent experiences. Nevertheless, the plausibility of this account is challenged by the lack of strong evidence that even years of exposure to social explanations of crime erodes punitiveness (Selke, 1980; Giacopassi and Blankenship, 1991; Mackey and Courtright, 2000; Lambert, 2004; Shelley et al, 2011; Falco and Martin, 2012; Chen and Einat, 2015). …”