Abstract
The penal exceptionalism of the United States vis-à-vis Canada and Western European counterparts, in terms of the number of incarcerated people, but also modes of punishment, length of sentences, and collateral consequences of a prison record, has been the subject of much well-regarded research by David Garland, Marie Gottschalk, Michael Tonry, James Whitman, Franklin Zimring, and others (Garland 2020; Gottschalk 2009; Tonry 2009; Whitman 2003; Zimring 2004). In illuminating the causes of U.S. exceptionalism, punitive “dispositional” factors unique to the general U.S. public have been cited, especially as they relate to the treatment of minorities (Garland 2020:337). Politicians and some advocates have taken almost as a truism that appearing “soft” on crime, including in crime prevention initiatives and policies, is political kryptonite. Thus, even Justice Reinvestment Initiatives (JRI), which were intended to divert money away from prisons via sentencing reforms, reducing the number of people incarcerated, have mostly channeled funds back into criminal justice institutions such as police so as not to awaken potential backlash.
This assumption of harsh attitudes by the American public and uniform “penal exceptionalism,” though, has missed an important counter-story, which is that of a robust support among Americans for crime prevention that is not immediately linked to police, courts, or corrections. Kevin Wozniak, Lecturer in the School of Law and Criminology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, in his new book, The Politics of Crime Prevention: Race, Public Opinion, and the Meaning of Community Safety, delves into this counter-story. He provides an intervention in the broader literature on public opinion and extends that literature to examine preferences and attitudes on crime-prevention strategies through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of how Americans understand the etiology of crime and how supportive they are of community-based preventive investments compared to criminal justice preventive investments. “Unless surveys start consistently asking Americans about support for non-punitive responses to crime, we will never possess the data necessary to create a proper longitudinal measure of progressive sentiment,” Wozniak argues (p. 8). He maps out differences across demographic variables, particularly race, class, gender, and political affiliation. He further investigates how support for community investment alternatives to funding criminal justice institutions may be affected through different political message frames around these investments, and how voters may or may not change their support for a politician based on community-investment based alternatives.
For this study, Wozniak used a mixed-methods approach, conducting six focus groups of 44 White and Black participants from the Greater Boston metropolitan area in 2016, dividing these according to race and education level as a proxy for class status. The moderator asked several questions: what they thought caused crime (what type of crime is not specified), five ideas to remedy crime, how the participants would spend extra money in the criminal justice budget to prevent crime (on criminal justice institutions or on more community-based solutions). He then conducted a national, representative survey using KnowledgePanel data archived at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data to probe related questions. Theoretically, the book rooted its hypotheses and analyses in racial priming theory—the idea that Whites will “backlash” against dog-whistle cues about policies that might benefit minorities but, in a post-civil-rights-movement environment where overt racism is frowned upon, will support policies that are overtly favorable to minorities—as well as Bonilla-Silva's notion of colorblind racism (2003).
Among Wozniak’s interesting and actionable findings from the focus group is the finding that, across race, gender, class, and political affiliation, Americans do not have an exclusively or even predominantly volitional understanding of why individuals commit crime. He presents how within the focus groups, participants provided arguments about crime causation that ran the gamut of adhering to strain theories, social learning theories, social control theories, environmental, and cultural theories of crime. There were some differences by race and class—for example, several working-class participants were more likely to present a structural argument for why parents may not be able to dedicate enough time to their children, several White participants expressed the most full-throated, exclusive support for criminal justice versus community-based interventions, Black participants were less encouraging of government interventions, and college-educated Black people were more likely to give personal responsibility arguments for crime prevention—but there was broad support for community-based crime prevention.
Counter to what might be a prevailing belief in polarization by race, class, population density (rural versus urban), or political affiliation, Wozniak’s analysis of the KnowledgePanel data similarly showed that Americans had similar likelihoods of expressing crime-prevention budget preferences that included prioritized community prevention over exclusively criminal justice responses. He posits, “the data indicate a large audience of Americans would be receptive to a message in favor of community investment” (p. 140). “The optimistic interpretation is that criminal justice continues to be one of the few ‘de-balkanized’ issues from which there is bipartisan appetite for reform in the early twenty-first century” (p. 223). Wozniak shows, for instance, that two-thirds of Black Americans preferred investing in community institutions. But so did over half of Whites surveyed.
Wozniak also debunks—and has to reject his own hypothesis based in racial priming theory—the notion that the American populace is highly susceptible to subtle racialized cues about policies and will withdraw support for these policies if they infer that they are going to support Black Americans. His White participants were only likely to move away from supporting community-based crime interventions if they were explicitly told those funds would go to African American communities (versus “inner-city” communities). Such withdrawal of support was also seen if participants were told that funds would support “rural” communities. He concludes that, as other literature has persuasively argued, overtly race-based appeals that may exclude Whites may lose a “persuadable middle” and are not necessary for galvanizing Black support (p. 203).
A final valuable contribution Wozniak makes is to empirically demonstrate how support for community investment falls into a “zone of acquiescence” for a broad swath of voters. In other words, even for those Americans who might prefer more criminal justice-oriented investments, they will not withdraw their support for politicians who choose to invest in community-based prevention strategies. This helps underline Wozniak’s overall argument that politicians have ignored the actual policy and budget preferences of Americans and, without fear of electoral losses, can openly espouse non-carceral, non-policing crime-prevention strategies.
How much we can rely on Wozniak’s data to inform actual political campaigns, though, is severely hamstrung by a limitation of the premise contained in his research (which he rightly points out in the book’s conclusion). The survey participants and focus group members were instructed to think about how they would spend “extra” money in the criminal justice budget that was garnered through savings on not incarcerating non-violent offenders. This is a highly idealized, non-dynamic scenario, insulated from “real-world” consequences. This is especially true when, as Wozniak notes, local spending on non-carceral “prevention” like schools is constrained. How would participants respond if taxes had to be increased? How would participants respond if the savings were to come from sentencing reform that involved violent offenders? The book is entirely silent on the issue of preferences for prevention strategies for violent offenses, which, given how the public responds most viscerally to violent crimes and that these are the offense category of almost 650,000 individuals in prison, seems like a major omission. Due to scope, necessarily, the book also leaves out potential impacts of socially salient events (such as rises in crime or a high-profile crime event) that can dramatically shift preferences.
At times, the book draws other hasty conclusions that might need more teasing out of additional factors. For example, for participants who allocated their hypothetical supplementary “budgets” exclusively to community-based alternatives, Wozniak suggests these participants might be open to abolitionist arguments. Drawing this inference from hypothetical extra budget funds from sentencing reductions would require much more bolstering. The book also presents as a form of White “backlash” White participants’ shifting away from community-based alternatives to budget alternatives like tax breaks when presented with the idea that only African Americans would receive funding. However, there were no analogous questions presented to other racial groups. For example, Blacks were not queried about support to only White communities, or Latino communities to Black communities, or Black communities to Latino communities. For that matter, Whites were not queried about support only to White communities. It might simply be that universalist arguments are more resonant with the American populace as a whole. We cannot judge based on the evidence. Last, Black participants who expressed more volitional explanations of crime were “read” as performing “respectability politics.” This seems to remove the ability for Black Americans to have perceptions of crime that do not accord with more structural explanations without that being linked to a desire other than to distance themselves from other people of color.
Overall, Wozniak’s book is very rigorously researched. His methods are presented with admirable transparency, and the book has an overarching, cohesive argument that is important in the post-2020 moment when a “tough on crime” backlash has emerged. It should serve to provide advocates and academics with a deeper understanding of the spectrum of Justice Reinvention Initiative policy preferences among Americans. It will certainly present a more cautiously optimistic sensibility about how Americans do not uniformly and unquestioningly adopt a “disposition” that is exceptionally harsh when it comes to crime-prevention preferences, and that they do not admit causes for crime other than ones that emerge from personal failings and pathologies.