The influence of offender nationality on individual punitiveness: Empirical evidence from Germany

• In Event: Sentencing 1. Race, Ethnicity and Sentencing

Abstract

The punishment of offenders is not only a matter for criminal courts. Rather, it is a highly political issue that is controversially discussed by the German society in media and politics. Virulent terms in the German debate on crime, especially in the context of increasing migration movements, such as "Ausländerkriminalität" (crime explicitly committed by foreigners) or "Clankriminalität” (gang crime by members of large families of Arab descent), show that for some social actors the origin of perpetrators is of particular importance in the question of how society should deal with crime and offenders.
Using data from a German population survey (N = 1,461), my contribution examines punitive attitudes in the German population and addresses the link between the rejection of people who have immigrated to Germany and the individual need to punish harshly. Using an experimental vignette design, punitive attitudes are operationalized as the respondents' individual desire for punishment in response to a fictitious criminal case committed by a German, Syrian, Congolese or Ukrainian asylum seeker.
The analyses show that people in Germany are significantly more in favor of harsher penalties for offenders who are characterized as asylum seekers than for German offenders. A closer look reveals that the most severe sentences are imposed on Syrian offenders, while the average sentence level for Ukrainian offenders does not differ significantly from that of German offenders. Possible backgrounds are explored and the social implications of the findings, in particular the significance for judicial sanctioning practice, are discussed.

Author

• Janosch Kleinschnittger, Universität Hamburg