TY - JOUR
T1 - Exploring the justice of punishments
T2 - Framing, Expressiveness, and the Just Prison Sentence
AU - Jasso, Guillermina
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant SBR-9321019.1 am grateful to Peter H. Rossi for kindly making available the data for this research, and for many insightful conversations. Early versions of portions of this paper were presented at the Vth Conference of the International Society for Justice Research, Reno, Nevada, June 1995; the First International Conference on Theory and Research on Group Processes, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, June 1996; and the Vlth Conference of the International Society for Justice Research, Potsdam, Germany, July 1997.1 am grateful to participants at those meetings for many helpful comments and suggestions, and especially to Stefan Liebig, Clara Sabbagh, Manfred Schmitt, Kjell Tornblom, Riel Vermunt, Murray Webster, Jr., and Bemd Wegener.
PY - 1998
Y1 - 1998
N2 - This paper examines views about the justice of punishments for offenders convicted of five major types of offenses-drug, violent, corporate, property, and victimless crimes. We focus on the just punishment and the just dispersion in the punishment distribution, together with observers' framing and expressiveness; and we test for interrespondent differences. Data are drawn from six U.S. samples interviewed in 1982, a probability sample of the adult population of a major city and samples of five special groups, prison inmates, police officers, law-school and high-school students, and Job Corps trainees. Respondents' judgments were obtained using Rossi's factorial survey method. Fictitious offenders were constructed by randomly combining offender, offense, and victim characteristics; and respondents used a line-matching technique to rate the justice of punishments randomly assigned to fictitious offenders. Analysis is guided by the framework for empirical justice analysis, which provides an integrated set of procedures for estimation and testing. Results indicate that respondents in all samples save one disagree with each other on the just punishment; and the six samples yield four distinct average orderings of just prison sentences. However, large majorities in all six samples find the dispersion in the punishments experimentally put into the vignette world to be too small relative to the just dispersion. More broadly, comparing the results obtained here from the probability sample of a major city with results from a comparable study on the justice of earnings, we find two interesting symmetries-approximately 1% of the general population is contrarian, regarding earnings as a bad and time in prison as a good; and approximately 92% to 94% of the population regard earnings inequality as too high and prison-time inequality as too low. Finally, this study provides additional evidence that the general population in the United States exhibits independence of mind informing their ideas about what constitutes the just earnings and the just punishment.
AB - This paper examines views about the justice of punishments for offenders convicted of five major types of offenses-drug, violent, corporate, property, and victimless crimes. We focus on the just punishment and the just dispersion in the punishment distribution, together with observers' framing and expressiveness; and we test for interrespondent differences. Data are drawn from six U.S. samples interviewed in 1982, a probability sample of the adult population of a major city and samples of five special groups, prison inmates, police officers, law-school and high-school students, and Job Corps trainees. Respondents' judgments were obtained using Rossi's factorial survey method. Fictitious offenders were constructed by randomly combining offender, offense, and victim characteristics; and respondents used a line-matching technique to rate the justice of punishments randomly assigned to fictitious offenders. Analysis is guided by the framework for empirical justice analysis, which provides an integrated set of procedures for estimation and testing. Results indicate that respondents in all samples save one disagree with each other on the just punishment; and the six samples yield four distinct average orderings of just prison sentences. However, large majorities in all six samples find the dispersion in the punishments experimentally put into the vignette world to be too small relative to the just dispersion. More broadly, comparing the results obtained here from the probability sample of a major city with results from a comparable study on the justice of earnings, we find two interesting symmetries-approximately 1% of the general population is contrarian, regarding earnings as a bad and time in prison as a good; and approximately 92% to 94% of the population regard earnings inequality as too high and prison-time inequality as too low. Finally, this study provides additional evidence that the general population in the United States exhibits independence of mind informing their ideas about what constitutes the just earnings and the just punishment.
KW - Empirical justice analysis
KW - Goods and bads
KW - Interrespondent differences
KW - Just reward function
KW - Justice evaluation function
KW - Rossi's factorial survey method
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1022171207173
DO - 10.1023/A:1022171207173
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0009889066
SN - 0885-7466
VL - 11
SP - 397
EP - 422
JO - Social Justice Research
JF - Social Justice Research
IS - 4
ER -