Marketing with Emotion: The Impact of Political Marketing Strategies on Canadian Sentencing Policy

• In Event: Global Sentencing Practices

Abstract

Criminal justice policies are produced, refined, disseminated, and interpreted in accordance with political presumptions about appropriate social and cultural emotional contexts (Krause 2008; Ahmed 2004; Bandes 1999). Although the salience of emotion in the criminal law is recognized (Karstedt 2002; Freiberg 2001), the application and political utility of emotional rhetoric in Canadian crime policy-making is understudied. Canadian Parliament has demonstrated a commitment to the propagation of emotional narratives about crime in lieu of reasoned or moderate deliberation of evidence (Tonry 2010) - a framing tactic that both echoes (Enns 2014) and intensifies (Ramirez 2013) punitive public sentiments in the U.S. This approach is evidenced by a gradual retraction of deference to expert opinion, statistics and evidence, and the ascendency of emotionally laden narratives that attempt to align party politics with moral rectitude through expressions of condemnation towards offenders and compassion for victims. Understanding how politicians deploy emotional narratives about crime to promote and justify their moral and legislative authority will shed light on the perceived utility of emotional rhetoric as a marketing tool, and if this discursive method poses a meaningful threat to the institutional/structural legal mechanisms that have insulated Canada from broad-sweeping punitive sentencing policies (Doob & Webster 2006).

Author

• Grant Valentine, University of Toronto