Punitive Attitudes Toward Individuals Convicted of Sex Offenses: A Vignette Study

Abstract

The public holds stereotypical beliefs about sex crimes, its perpetrators, and its victims, which may influence punitive attitudes toward individuals convicted of sex offenses (ICSOs). Using a nationally representative vignette survey experiment, we examined whether this punitivity toward ICSOs was influenced by deviations from the stereotypical sex crime case. We also explored whether these influences differed between adult and child victim crimes, and whether they differed between sentencing and post-release supervision policy preferences. We found that the respondents consistently recommended more lenient punishments for female perpetrators and harsher punishments for child victim crimes. A child victim rendered other characteristics less relevant. Despite some similarities between sentencing and post-release policy decisions, male victims elicited longer prison sentences as punishment, while perpetrators with stranger victims yielded more support for post-release policies meant to protect society. Overall, while punitivity toward ICSOs was generally high, the most punitivity was reserved for male perpetrators and child victim crimes.

Keywords:

• Sex offenders
• public attitudes
• reentry
• stereotypes
• sentencing

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Melissa Morabito for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article as well as the feedback of Dr. Megan Kurlychek and multiple anonymous reviewers. As is usually the case, most errors and omissions are the fault of the second author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A recent Supreme Court decision, United States v. Haymond (2019), reinforced this point by declaring that new custodial sentences for sex offenses committed while on supervised release cannot be imposed by judges using “preponderance of evidence” standards, but rather must be the result of a jury trial conviction using “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards. Thus, juries are afforded a direct say in whether to convict and impose a new mandatory minimum sentence. The authors would like to thank Guy Hamilton-Smith for his assistance in this matter.

2 Other characteristics also describe a “real rape” stereotype, such as the crime occurring in an outdoor location and the victim physically resisting. For the purposes of this study, these factors are not directly tested.

3 Note that the execution of ICSOs who have not murdered their victims has been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (“Coker v. Georgia,” 1977; “Kennedy v. Louisiana,” 2008).

4 Respondents were not given the opportunity to give Alex Baker a non-custodial sanction for a number of conceptual and practical reasons. Primarily, the purpose of the vignette was to serve as a heuristic for representing punitive attitudes of respondents, as opposed to actual sentencing practices by judges. Previous theoretical work in sentencing has suggested that the decision to incarcerate and the sentence length decision are qualitatively different (Spohn, 2000; Wheeler, Weisburd, & Bode, 1982). Recent research with ICSOs has suggested that the predictors of incarceration and length of sentence are quantitatively distinct as well (Rydberg, Cassidy, et al., 2018; Thompson, Rydberg, Cassidy, & Socia, 2019). As such, incorporating non-custodial sanctions would require extending the analysis to both decisions to avoid these qualitative and quantitative differences from biasing parameter estimates. However, only 30 respondents (3%) chose the lowest possible sentence (–9, 1 year); so it is unlikely that many respondents would have opted for a non-custodial sanction if the option was offered, in support of prior research findings (Mears et al., 2008).

5 Unrotated factor loadings ranged from 0.60 to 0.78 on the first factor, and any additional or rotation-created factors were uninterpretable with smaller loadings.

6 Cases were included if the respondent answered more than 50% of the underlying policy questions (N = 991). As this measure was used as a dependent variable, we decided not to impute missing data for cases missing 50% or more of the underlying policy questions (N = 8). The correlation between the alpha-generated measure and the factor loading measure was 0.998, suggesting virtually identical measures regardless of the method used.

7 Note that we specifically did not identify the race or ethnicity of either the perpetrator or the victim in the vignette. This was done to help limit the number of influences to those specifically being examined from the stereotypes identified earlier (victim and perpetrator sex, victim age, and relationship). Adding an additional layer of the experimental conditions would have also resulted in an underpowered design, given that the survey was conducted with a fixed sample size.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Center for Public Opinion Research, the Office of the Dean of Fine Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, and the Office of the Provost at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Notes on contributors

Kelly M. Socia

Kelly M. Socia, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies and a Fellow for the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His research interests include registered sex offenders and public policies, offender reentry and recidivism, public opinion and policy-making, and spatial analyses. His research has appeared in Criminology & Public Policy, Crime & Delinquency, Sexual Abuse, and now, finally, Justice Quarterly.

Jason Rydberg

Jason Rydberg is an assistant professor of criminology and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he is also co-director of the Center for Program Evaluation. His research interests concern the evaluation of criminal justice program and policies, particularly in the areas of prisoner reentry, community supervision, and sex offender policy. His research has recently appeared in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Sexual Abuse.

Christopher P. Dum

Christopher Dum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Kent State University and the author of “Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel” from Columbia University Press. His research has recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Criminology and Sexual Abuse. He is also the co-founded of the ID13 Prison Literacy Project: www.id13project.com.