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Citizens and criminal justice: an overestimated sense of punishment
Thu, September 7, 8:00 to 9:15am, Palazzo Congressi, Floor: second floor, Congressi 11Abstract
This article deals with social representations of criminal justice in France. The article underlines the profound discrepancy between the abstract representations of criminal justice, in relation to their conceptions of delinquency, sentences and their aims, and their judgements on concrete situations. There is also a relative depoliticisation of assessments of concrete cases. While a majority of respondents share the feeling of excessive judicial leniency concerning certain types of offences or offenders, their positions are much more nuanced when the context of the cases is detailed. Beyond the criminal offence, which is considered in the abstract, they look at the harm and the course of events, the criminal record, but also at the perpetrator's motivations, personality and history: this leads them to adjust their judgements on the severity of the sentence. This finding is observed in both the qualitative and quantitative surveys, and confirms results observed abroad (Frost 2010 ; Kuhn, Vuillé 2010 ; Leclerc 2012 ; Leclerc et al. 2017).
This paper is based on a mixed research design conducted in France (Vigour et al. 2022): a focus group research involving 80 participants, and a quantitative survey with 2370 respondents (from a scientific panel created through a representative random sample). Three-hour interviews were conducted with 17 groups, constituted on the basis of social belonging (socio-professional category and level of educational attainment; workers, employees, or temporary workers, as opposed to working in intermediary or managerial roles and the professions), whether or not participants had court experience, and the type of court: civil or criminal. The qualitative and quantitative survey protocol was designed in parallel and symmetrically: first general questions; then the reaction to excerpts from a documentary film on criminal justice; and vignettes.