Racialized Cues and Support for Justice Reinvestment: A Mixed-Method Study of Public Opinion, Boston, 2016 (ICPSR 36778)

Version Date: May 16, 2018

Cite this study |

Principal Investigator(s):
Kevin Wozniak, University of Massachusetts Boston

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36778.v1

Version V1

Slide tabs to view more

Summary

These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.

Within the past fifteen years, policymakers across the country have increasingly supported criminal justice reforms designed to reduce the scope of mass incarceration in favor of less costly, more evidence-based approaches to preventing and responding to crime. One of the primary reform efforts is the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), a public-private partnership through which state governments work to diagnose the primary drivers of their state incarceration rates, reform their sentencing policies to send fewer nonviolent offenders to prison, and reinvest the saved money that used to go into prisons into alternatives to incarceration, instead.

This mixed-methods study sought to assess public opinion about the justice reinvestment paradigm of reform and to determine whether exposure to racialized and race-neutral cues affects people's willingness to allocate money into criminal justice institutions versus community-based social services in order to reduce and prevent crime.

Citation

Wozniak, Kevin. Racialized Cues and Support for Justice Reinvestment: A Mixed-Method Study of Public Opinion, Boston, 2016. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2018-05-16. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36778.v1

Export Citation:

  • RIS (generic format for RefWorks, EndNote, etc.)
  • EndNote

Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (2015-IJ-CX-0003)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

State/Region

Restrictions

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reason for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Hide

Time Period(s)

2016-09 -- 2016-10

Date of Collection

2016-09 -- 2016-10

Data Collection Notes

  1. Qualitative focus group data obtained as part of this mixed-methods study is not available as part of this collection.

Hide

Study Purpose

The past fifteen years have seen the emergence and growth of a bipartisan coalition of policymakers, criminal justice professionals, advocates, and scholars who argue that the American criminal justice system must be reformed. This coalition contends that the nation's practice of "mass incarceration" is costly, inefficient, unsustainable, and the cause of a host of deleterious collateral consequences that disproportionately harm already disadvantaged neighborhoods and the residents therein. Despite justice reinvestment being proven popular among policymakers, little evidence currently exists that measures public opinion about the justice reinvestment paradigm.

Numerous past studies have found that the American public's opinions regarding the criminal justice system varies widely depending on factors related to type of crime, rate of recidivism, and racial identity of the offender. Numerous studies found that exposure to racialized cues (i.e., words, phrases, or images that are closely associated with people of color in American public and political discourse) activates whites' racial stereotypes and causes them to express greater support for punitive criminal punishments and greater opposition to social policies designed to alleviate the material deprivation disproportionately experienced by people of color.

The study had two primary goals:

  1. To directly assess public opinion about the Justice Reinvestment paradigm of reform, and to measure people's crime prevention preferences within the constraint of a zero-sum budget, as well as their willingness to use alternatives to incarceration for offenders convicted of violent crimes.
  2. To test whether exposure to a variety of racialized and race-neutral cues significantly affects people's willingness to allocate money into criminal justice institutions versus community-based social services in order to reduce and prevent crime.

Study Design

A survey experiment was conducted and administered by the firm GfK to participants in its online "Knowledge Panel," a randomly-selected sample of people that is representative of the U.S. population. Survey participants were asked questions similar to those asked of the focus group participants. They were asked to state their support or opposition to sentencing nonviolent offenders to community-based supervision instead of prison, and they were asked to allocate money among six different options in a hypothetical crime prevention budget. The budget options were: hire more police, hire more probation officers, fund clinics to provide healthcare and mental healthcare in communities, increase funding in community public schools, fund economic development programs to create jobs in communities, or give taxpayers a tax rebate.

The rhetoric manipulation of the experiment varied the language used to describe the communities that would receive funding. Each participant was randomly-assigned to one of seven conditions:

  1. High crime communities,
  2. High poverty communities,
  3. Communities with many residents on welfare,
  4. Inner-city communities,
  5. Rural communities,
  6. African American communities, or
  7. Communities (i.e., the control group).

Prior studies found that the language of conditions 1 through 4 evoke subconscious stereotypes about people of color, making them color-blind but racialized cues. Condition 6 is an explicitly racialized cue, which is hypothesized to evoke less backlash because of social norms against appearing racist. Finally, condition 5 is designated to be a white racialized cue to serve as a point of contrast.

Sample

The survey experiment participants were drawn from GfK's Knowledge Panel. The Knowledge Panel is a disproportionate stratified sample of the United States population selected using address-based sampling via the delivery sequence file of the United States Postal Service. A full description of GfK's sampling methodology can be found in the GfK Survey Codebook.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

Non-Hispanic White and African-American adults age 18 and over residing in the United States.

Unit(s) of Observation

Individual

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Description of Variables

Demographic Variables Include:

  • Interview start/finish time and duration (minutes)
  • Age
  • Education Level
  • Race/Ethnicity
  • Gender
  • Political Party Affiliation
  • Household Head, Size, Type, Ownership and Income
  • Number of Household Members by Age
  • Marital Status
  • State/Region of Residence

Other Variables:

  • Support/Opposition on Sentencing Nonviolvent Offenders
  • Budget Surplus Allocation Preferences (Spending surplus on criminal justice vs. community-based programs and services.)
  • Voter Behaviors and Attitudes
  • Stereotypical Beliefs
  • Confidence on Criminal Justice System's Race Equality in Treatment

Variable-Level Statistics for the collection include: 68 variables and 2010 cases

Response Rates

Of the 3916 sampled, 2010 respondents completed the survey - depicting a 51% Survey Response Rate.

Presence of Common Scales

Several Likert-type scales were used.

Hide

Original Release Date

2018-05-16

Hide

Weight

GfK developed a study-specific post-stratification weight for these survey data. The weight was estimated against benchmarks from the 2015 Current Population Survey. Full details about the creation of the weight variable (weight1) can be found in the GfK Survey Codebook.

Hide

Notes

  • These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.