Political Ideology and Attitudes Toward Pretrial Justice: Exploring the Mediating Role of Racial Resentment

Abstract

Although jurisdictions across the U.S. have implemented pretrial justice reforms with varying support from lawmakers across the political divide, there is limited research exploring public opinion of pretrial justice. This study explores possible partisan dimensions of pretrial justice attitudes, focusing on perceptions of detention as crime control, defendants being undeserving of detention, and detention punishing defendants. Given recent research highlighting the influence of racial resentment on attitudes toward criminal justice, we use path analyses to test whether racial resentment mediates any relationship between political ideology and pretrial justice attitudes. Relative to conservatives, liberals are less supportive of using pretrial detention for crime control and more concerned that pretrial detention punishes defendants. These associations operate directly and indirectly via racial resentment; conservatives report higher racial resentment, and racial resentment is associated with attitudes regarding each dimension of pretrial ­justice. Addressing modern racism is critical for bipartisan pretrial justice reform.

Keywords:

• Pretrial justice
• public opinion
• political ideology
• racial resentment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since less than 1% of respondents failed multiple screener questions, we did not exclude these individuals from our analysis because they are unlikely to bias our results.

2 Before answering pretrial detention questions, respondents received the following prompt: “For the purposes of the questions below, pretrial detention is defined as incarceration while awaiting trial and pretrial release is defined as living in the community while awaiting trial. A jail/prison sentence is defined as incarceration after conviction via trial/guilty plea. Bail is the amount of money a defendant pays as collateral for their return to court in exchange for their release from pretrial detention while awaiting trial.”

3 The alpha value for the detention as crime control (0.7528) is above acceptable levels, offering empirical support for the use of this measure. The correlations for our outcome measures are as follows: detention as crime control and undeserving of detention (r = −0.70), detention as crime control and detention as punishment (r = −0.82), and undeserving of detention and detention as punishment (r = 0.46).

4 Supplementary models without political ideology have slightly larger coefficients for racial resentment than models including political ideology in Table 3. These findings suggest that racial resentment may mediate only a small portion of the relationship between political ideology and pretrial justice attitudes. This aligns with prior research employing racial resentment (rather than political ideology), as a mediator of criminal justice attitudes (Hannan et al., 2022; Pickett & Chiricos, 2012).

5 When racial resentment is excluded in supplementary models, the effect sizes for many of the liberal coefficients increase, and the differences between liberals and conservatives become significant with respect to the “undeserving of detention” factor, offering further evidence of the mediating role of racial resentment. Moreover, beta coefficients indicate that political ideology and racial resentment have some of the largest effect sizes among the variables in our models, further highlighting the importance of these variables for shaping attitudes toward pretrial detention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stacie St. Louis

Stacie St. Louis is an assistant professor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at American University. She holds a PhD in Criminology and Justice Policy from Northeastern University and a BA in Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on the administration of justice, including pretrial detention and case processing.

Nick Petersen

Nick Petersen is an associate professor of Sociology & Criminology at the University of Miami, where he has a secondary appointment in the School of Law. His research focuses on racial/ethnic inequalities in the criminal justice system, attitudes toward the criminal justice system, and stratification (including the collateral consequences of criminal justice contact).