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A TASTE FOR PUNISHMENT: Black and White Americans' Views on the Death Penalty and the War on Drugs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2004

Lawrence D. Bobo  and
Devon Johnson
Lawrence D. Bobo
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Devon Johnson
Affiliation:
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University
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Abstract

It is commonly accepted that Black and White Americans hold divergent views about the criminal justice system. Furthermore, many accept the view that U.S. public opinion is unflinchingly punitive where issues of criminal justice policy are concerned, with this punitiveness among White Americans deriving to a significant degree from anti-Black prejudice. Using a series of survey-based experiments and large, nationally representative samples of White and African American respondents, we subject the questions of Black-White polarization, unyielding punitiveness, and the influence of racial prejudice to close scrutiny. Our results, first, confirm large Black-White differences in opinion with Blacks consistently less punitive than Whites. These differences are substantially a result of beliefs about the extent of racial bias in the criminal justice system. Second, the framing experiments suggest that responses to the death penalty are very different than responses to drug-related crimes like crack or powder cocaine use, with the former exhibiting far less malleability than the latter. Third, racial prejudice is a consistently large influence on White public opinion and a weaker, but sometimes important influence among Blacks as well. Implications for discourse on race and crime are also discussed.

Keywords

Death PenaltyCocaineCrackPublic OpinionCrimePrejudice
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 151 - 180
Copyright
© 2004 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

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