Measuring Public Perceptions of Appropriate Prison Sentences, Final Report

摘要

This research project was designed to test several new methodologies for eliciting information on the public's preferences towards sentencing and parole of criminal offenders. It partly relies upon the well-established methodology used by Wolfgang et a1 (1985) and others, whereby a sample of the U.S. public is asked to react to a series of crime vignettes. Although this approach has mostly been used in previous studies on crime seriousness, a few studies have used this approach to gauge the public's attitude towards sentencing. These studies have generally been limited to a few crimes in one state, and more recently (Rossi and Berk, 1995 and 1997), on federal crimes. One of the main purposes of these public opinion surveys has been to compare existing sentencing practice to the public's preferred approach.