To Prevent, Punish, or Forgive? Crime Characteristics and Opinions on Security

• In Event: Public Policy Attitudes

Abstract

Crime is pervasive in Latin America, with serious consequences for democracy. For decades, crime and security have dominated much of the political landscape in some of the region’s countries overwhelmed by crime and violence. Political leaders have exploited public anxieties about crime for their political purposes, often proposing extreme security measures to fight crime. These “tough-on-crime” platforms are popular among the public, and very few, if any, counterproposals to fighting crime are offered. In this paper, we examine the impacts of crime type and perpetrator characteristics on public preferences for both diverse “crime-fighting policies” and the types of actors responsible for preventing, controlling, and responding to crime. We aim to offer a more nuanced view of public attitudes toward crime in its various manifestations since the literature has largely focused on explaining the rise of punitive attitudes. Using survey experiments from Brazil, we demonstrate that different types of crimes elicit different preferred policy responses. We argue that our results demonstrate that citizens of Latin America are much less punitive than what is often acknowledged.

Authors

• Helen Rabello Kras, Regis University

• Kelly Senters Piazza, United States Air Force Academy