Beliefs about an Offender’s Capacity to Be Rehabilitated: Black Offenders Are Seen as More Capable of Change

Abstract

One goal of incarceration is offender rehabilitation. We examined whether characteristics of an offender affect beliefs about rehabilitation capacity. In three studies using large samples, we investigated inferences about criminal offenders who were described as juveniles or adults (15 or 30 years old). Participants read about or were shown a picture of a White or Black actor. They judged the offender’s maturation, intentionality, and long-term goals, and indicated their rehabilitation capacity. Black offenders, regardless of age, were seen as more capable of rehabilitation, seen as possessing less intentionality, and having more positive long-term goals than White offenders. Discussion focuses on potential explanations for the data including system justification and attitudinal influence.

Disclosure statement

The authors of this publication have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical approval

This research was conducted following the US federal policy for the protection of human subjects. The institutional review board at the University of Texas Permian Basin approved this research (IRB # 2016-037). The authors followed all author guidelines as specified in the APA code of conduct.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/axn36/files/.

Notes

1 In Piquero et al.’s (2010) work, there were no differences in rehabilitation attitudes by race. However, most participants in this study were White.

2 Data were collected at the center for decision research in downtown Chicago. Although information regarding the number of student to public participants was not collected about 60% of samples on average are composed of non-student, public participants.

3 A few measures were included in the survey but not discussed here. Two measures were related to but were not highly correlated to intentionality attributions; the offender’s ability to foresee the consequences of his actions, the extent to which he desired to perform the behavior. A question regarding whether or not the offender was essentially a criminal was also not included. Finally, a question regarding whether rehabilitation would decrease the likelihood that Joe would commit crimes in the future was not strongly correlated to the rehabilitation scale and dropped from analysis. In accordance with the Open Science Framework, we confirm that for all experiments, we have reported all measures, conditions, data exclusions and how we determined sample size and our stopping rule. The current studies were not preregistered, but the data will be made available on the OSF upon publication.

4 This analysis produced no significant effects when conducted with maturation, intentionality, and long-term goal judgements.

5 A measure regarding participant’s belief concerning whether the criminal justice is biased was also used. However, as this was not a validated scale, and it was strongly correlated with SDO-D, liberalism, and racial typification, it was not included here.

6 This analysis was performed with the other dependent measures. The effect sizes associated with maturity were negligible. However, White participants rated target’s intentionality higher (M = 6.90, SD = 1.72) than racial minority participants (M = 6.50, SD = 1.99), η²_p = .016. White participants also rated offender’s long-term goals higher (M = 6.53, SD = 1.68) than racial minority participants (M = 6.08, SD = 1.98), η²_p = .013.

7 Data collection for this project was complete as of December 2019.

8 This analysis, conducted with maturity judgements showed that White participants attributed less maturity to offenders (M = 5.50, SD = 1.55) than did racial minority participants (M = 5.97, SD = 1.77), η²_p = .014. Further, there was a small effect size associated with the Age by Participant Race interaction, η²_p = .014. In adolescent conditions, racial minority participants believed the offender was more mature (M = 5.41, SD = 1.61) than White participants (M = 4.92, SD = 1.18), η²_p = .011. However, the effect size in the adult conditions were negligible, η²_p = .007. Theeffect sizes associated with on intentionality judgments was negligible. However, a three-way interaction of Race condition, Participant Race, and Age condition on long term goals, η²_p = .017 was followed by simple effects analysis in the adolescent conditions. White participants rated the long term goals of White offenders higher (M = 6.28, SD = 1.83) than racial minority participants (M = 5.48, SD = 1.46), η²_p = .008. The effect size associated with the Race condition in the adult conditions were negligible.