Attitudes towards punishment

Public attitudes to sanctioning reflect a general assumption what governmental reaction is justified to what crime. Therefore a sanction is essential to restore justice that has been disturbed by the committed crime. Attitudes to punishment are influenced by cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes and do not necessarily reflect the sanctioning practice of the courts. The aim of an own large-scale survey in two different German towns was to get more insights into public attitudes to punishment. Based on different criminal situations the respondents were asked to propose the - in their opinion - justified sanction. The results showed distinct attitudes toward the punishment of different crimes. While abortion, consumption of marihuana, and squatting are seen as least punishable, crimes like graffiti, personal theft, consumption of heroin, or drinking and driving are imposed with sanctions of an intermediate severity. Harsh sanctions are proposed for crimes like robbery, assault, burglary, theft of car, indecent assault, or rape. Mostly the East Germans favored harsher sanctions than the West Germans, especially for drug-related crimes. But the more severe the offence, the smaller were the differences between East and West. The data show that a differentiated, crime related measurement of attitudes to punishment leads to more valid and more reliable results than the often used question on the support of the death penalty. A comparison between proposed sanctions and real sentences of German penal courts in the same time period confirmed the assumption that the public is much more punitive than courts are. For many of the selected crimes the subjects proposed an unconditional imprisonment or at least probation, while courts mostly imposed fines. In sum, everyday opinions on crime and punishment are not at all uniform. Personal experiences as well as the amount of information on the crime and its offender have a strong impact on attitudes to sanctioning. This requires a careful and comprehensive measurement beyond the question on the support of death penalty