The reports draw on the Victorian component of a national survey of public attitudes to sentencing. They offer a perspective on the Sentencing Act 1991 (Vic), which identifies five purposes for which a court may impose a sentence on an adult offender -
• just punishment – to punish the offender in a way that is just in all of the circumstances;The first report, based on responses from 1,200 survey respondents, examines "how punitive people are". Gelb concludes that "Victorians are moderately punitive", with higher levels of punitiveness unsurprisingly being found among people -
• deterrence – to deter the offender (individual deterrence) or other people (general deterrence) from committing such offences;
• rehabilitation – to establish conditions that will enable the offender’s rehabilitation;
• denunciation – to denounce the offender’s behaviour; and
• community protection – to protect the community from the offender (typically via incapacitation in a 'correctional institution')
• who feel that current sentences are too lenientPunitiveness is "also higher among people whose main source of information is commercial/tabloid media, people with no tertiary education and people who describe themselves as politically conservative".
• who believe that judges should reflect public opinion when sentencing
• who feel that crime has increased
• those with lower levels of confidence in sentencing.
Gelb comments that -
In summary, studies of the role of demographic variables consistently find that education is the strongest predictor of punitiveness, with more highly educated people being less punitive. Results for other demographic variables have been less consistent. As a group, demographic variables collectively are fairly weak predictors of punitive attitudes.The second report examines community views of the purposes of sentencing. The authors indicate that the results show respondent preferences regarding the purposes of sentencing vary according to different offence/offender combinations. The most important purpose of sentencing for young offenders and for first-time offenders is rehabilitation, while for adults and repeat offenders the most important purpose is punishment.
Far stronger predictors are found in variables measuring the subjective importance of crime, or 'crime salience' (Costelloe, Chiricos and Gertz, 2009). These variables measure factors such as fear of crime, concern about crime as a social problem and crime victimisation experience. Of these, fear of crime has been consistently linked with punitiveness, as have measures of people’s perceptions of crime as increasing. Victimisation experience, on the other hand, is not a predictor of punitive attitudes. The role of the media in shaping people’s punitive attitudes is clear, with a plethora of studies in various countries showing that people whose main source of news and information is commercial or tabloid media are more punitive than are those who consume non-commercial or broadsheet media.
The first working hypothesis for this research is thus that, of the demographic variables, the strongest predictor of punitiveness will be education. The second hypothesis is the type of media people use will be a significant predictor of punitiveness. Variables measuring crime salience – perceptions of crime and worry about crime – should also predict people’s responses on the punitiveness scale. And as punitiveness may be seen as but one specific instance of a general constellation of criminal justice attitudes, it is also hypothesised that other measures of criminal justice attitudes – in particular, attitudes to the courts and sentencing – will also play a role in this study in predicting punitiveness.
The Council comments that -
together, the two reports show that community views on sentencing are complex, and that giving people more information, such as specific case studies, allows more nuanced responses to survey questions.
