Social Identity and Perceptions of Criminal Justice System Effectiveness

• In Event: Roundtable: Individual-Level Explanations of Crime

Abstract

This study tests if perceptions of the effectiveness of criminal justice agencies vary with social identities, in this case political orientation and church membership. Results may help explain public misperceptions of crime and hostility towards criminal justice agencies, and undergraduate students’ resistance to dissonant information taught in crime studies courses. Regression analyses were performed using survey data collected from 342 students in introductory criminology and sociology courses at a mid-sized university in the Southeastern US. Models controlled for demographic variables (age, race, and gender) and competing predictors (media exposure, feeling safe in one’s neighborhood, violent victimization, and optimistic worldview), and three outcomes were examined. First, church membership increased the odds that respondents identified crime in the US as a “very serious problem”; being highly politically conservative also increased them but only at the .10 significance level. Second, political conservativeness increased perceived police effectiveness. Third, political conservativeness and church membership increased perceived court effectiveness. However, two education variables, criminology major and class level, were highly insignificant across all models. These preliminary results suggest that perceptions of criminal justice, favorable and unfavorable, are shaped by how students perceive themselves more than their education.

Authors

• Lee M Johnson, William Paterson University of New Jersey

• Elizabeth K Ayers, Unaffiliated