Fear or Loathing in the US? Public Opinion and Racial Disparity in Mass Incarceration, 1978 - 2015

• In Event: 3446 - Contemporary Issues in Public Opinion Research: Inequality, Representation, and Populism

Abstract

Although a large body of literature identifies glaring racial disparities at all stages of criminal justice processing, little empirical research has assessed the influence of public sentiment on the growth of racial disparity in incarceration rates during mass incarceration. This article tests the influence of racial animus and traces a portion of the rise in racial disparity in incarceration rates to historically high levels of fear of crime. It analyzes roughly forty years of annual data on incarceration at the state and national level, leveraging analytic methods developed in political science to construct robust measures of public opinion from the General Social Survey and the Gallup poll. Results from time series and fixed effects analyses show that public fear of crime played a larger role in explaining rising racial disparity in incarceration rates than either racial animus or racial threat. Further analyses also demonstrate that fear of crime mediates a sizable portion of the effect of racial gaps in violent offending. These findings reveal that it is not overt prejudice, such as racial animus, but fear of crime and beliefs about Black criminality that contribute to much racial inequality in the criminal justice system.

Authors

• Scott W. Duxbury

• Dana L. Haynie, Ohio State University