Differences in Punitiveness Across Three Cultures: A Test of American Exceptionalism in Justice Attitudes
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and a more punitive approach to criminal justice issues than comparable Western democracies. One potential explanation for this distinctiveness is that Americans, as individuals, are uniquely punitive toward criminals. The present study explores the possibility of cultural differences in punitive attitudes. Census-representative samples of Americans, Canadians, and Germans were asked to assign sentences to a variety of people who had committed different offenses. Even though Canada has much more lenient sentencing policies than the United States in practice, Americans and Canadians generally did not differ from each other in sentencing attitudes. Both assigned slightly longer sentences than did Germans, however. Americans, therefore, do not appear to be uniquely punitive at the individual level. Also, people from all three cultures were in agreement about the moral wrongfulness of most baseline crimes, indicating that enhanced American and Canadian punitiveness is not due to an increased sense of moral outrage. Institutional explanations for American Exceptionalism in policies are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it