Public support for harsh criminal justice policy and its moral and ideological tides.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the late 1970s on, penal populism, or the tendency for the public to support harsh criminal justice policies, has been recognized as a driving force of socially and economically costly punitive trends in the Western world. This support has traditionally been attributed to political leanings and related ideological systems. A competing view is that policy preferences reflect deep-seated individualizing and binding moral systems. However, each view has difficulty refuting the other in empirical and theoretical terms. Using a structural equation modeling approach, this study applies 2 competing theoretical models to investigate the ideological and moral underpinnings of public support for harsh criminal justice policy. Results suggest both ideological and moral components to public punitiveness. Though right-wing authoritarianism was most strongly associated with supporting harsh criminal justice policies, we find some indication of the underlying importance of moral concerns. We argue that persistent public calls for harsh criminal justice policy could be abated by appealing to deeply ingrained and universal moral concerns about fairness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".