Asymmetric Compassion Collapse, Collateral Consequences, and Reintegration: An Experiment

Abstract

Public opinion is doubly important for reintegration, as it shapes both the policy and the stigma environments that people with criminal records must face. Nowhere are the policy and stigma environments bleaker than for record holders convicted of sex crimes. Drawing on the theory of compassion collapse (or psychic numbing) and using experimental data from a national survey, we examine the effects of informing members of the public about the hardships faced by record holders convicted of sex crimes, and we compare those effects (or the lack thereof) to the effects of victim discourse. We also randomize the information format: aggregate/statistical versus personal narratives. We find that narratives about crime victims’ suffering matter to the public—increasing aversive emotions, support for collateral consequences, and stigmatization—but narratives about record holders’ suffering do not. We conclude by discussing alternative communication strategies that public criminologists may use to garner public support for progressive criminal justice reforms.

Keywords:

• Psychic numbing
• Public opinion
• emotions
• stigmatization
• sexual offending
• sex crime

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Examples of these named laws include The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which presents mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and implements harsher sentences for crimes against children; Megan’s Law, which requires states to notify residents in a neighborhood if a convicted sex offender moves in nearby; and Jessica’s Law, which requires harsh mandatory minimum sentences for those convicted of specific sexual crimes committed against children aged 11 or under (Smith, 2021; see also Kulig & Cullen, 2017).

2 It is also possible that mass incarceration is not so much ending, as changing (or bifurcating) into hard- versus soft-end approaches to sanctioning (Seeds, 2017).

3 Whereas the policies that gave rise to mass incarceration were supported by both the public and policymakers across party lines (Enns, 2016; Hinton, 2016), there has been growing public disagreement and a widening partisan divide in attitudes since the late 1990s (see Figure A2 in the online supplement).

4 The computer generated images used in this study were selected from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

5 We also estimated the models using a mean index based only on the four sexual-offending-specific collateral consequences. The results, which are shown in Table A2 of the online supplement, were similar, especially in reference to the effects of the value-collapse manipulations.

6 Income was the variable with most item non-response (about 10%), and thus, similar to many prior studies (Burton et al., 2021a; Pickett et al., 2013), we imputed missing income values based on the other variables used in the analysis. However, the key findings are similar using the unimputed income variable.

7 Our survey, like most polls, also mostly measures “top-of-the-head” rather than deliberative or informed attitudes. Individuals’ top-of-the-head attitudes are often fickle and noisy. That said, top-of-the-head attitudes are what exist in the real world and, as noisy as they are, they aggregate into public opinion that is meaningful, stable by default but not unmovable, and coherently responsive to real-world conditions (Page & Shapiro, 1992; Pickett, 2019). Additionally, deliberative and informed opinions are only temporary artifacts; they also depend heavily on the specific information that is provided to respondents (Pickett, 2019).