Is Criminal Punishment Prosocial?

• In Event: Public Perceptions of Criminal Justice Policy and Practice

Abstract

Criminal punishment is said to be justified, even warranted, by its promotion of positive societal goals: restoring justice, reducing crime, reinforcing societal norms, and rehabilitating offenders. Yet, punishment policy in the United States has produced an excessive, racialized, and socially harmful incarceration regimen. One key to this enigma stems from the punitiveness of the American public, as channeled through the political process. We set out to probe the notion of punitiveness, to explore whether it may be influenced also by goals that diverge from punishment’s purported prosociality. Testing a sample of 480 US respondents, we measured how twenty-one different factors (comprising of sixty-seven measures) correlated with punitiveness and with one another. The findings reveal that punitiveness is a highly complex, yet cohesive, psychological mindset that correlates strongly with a slew of beliefs, emotions, attitudes, personality traits, worldviews, ideologies, and racial sentiments, most of which are orthogonal—if not inimical—to its avowed prosociality. Notably, we find that punitiveness is closely interrelated with vengeance, hatred, aggression, anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic sentiments, and more. These findings call for a shift in the prevailing discourse to include a frank acknowledgement that criminal punishment serves also to satisfy the punishing public’s own—often unsavory—needs.

Authors

• Dan Simon, University of Southern California

• David Melnikoff, Stanford Graduate School of Business