Experience Versus Expectation: Economic Insecurity, the Great Recession, and Support for the Death Penalty

• In Event: Attitudes Toward the Death Penalty

Abstract

Beginning in 2009, the U.S. prison population began to decline for the first time in nearly four decades (Petersilia & Cullen, 2015). One threat to this prison downsizing movement, however, is the possibility of an increase in public punitiveness, especially among White males, stemming from the lasting economic insecurity caused by the Great Recession (Gottschalk, 2014). A long theoretical tradition links economic downturns to harsher criminal punishments. Scholars theorize that people who have recently experienced an increase in economic hardship and those who forecast future economic deterioration will be more punitive toward criminals. Unfortunately, researchers have only recently begun to test this association, and the findings from this small literature have been inconsistent. The current study contributes to this line of inquiry by investigating a uniquely rich set of economic insecurity measures included in a very large national survey (N = 9,060) fielded during a time period of special theoretical salience: the Great Recession of 2007-2009. We explore the effects of experienced and expected personal, vicarious, and societal economic insecurity on support for the death penalty. Contrary to the hypotheses, expectations of future economic insecurity are negatively associated with death penalty support, but this relationship is conditional on respondents’ demographics.

Authors

• Justin Tyler Pickett, University at Albany, SUNY

• Peter S. Lehmann, Florida State University