Student Attitudes Toward Capital Punishment Kim Haranczak, Chris Kobos and Robert Elgie Spring 1999 The late 20th C. represents an interesting period in American history with respect to capital punishment. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the death penalty as then administered. For a short time no prisoners were executed. Then, in 1976, the Court upheld revised State capital punishment laws. Since then, the number of states that have authorized the death penalty for certain crimes has increased. By yearend 1997 the death penalty was authorized by the statutes of 38 states. There is substantial variability from state to state in what are considered to be capital offenses. For example, in Florida, first-degree murder, felony murder, and capital drug trafficking are capital offenses. Mississippi adds to capital murder, capital rape and aircraft piracy. In California the capital crimes are first-degree murder with special circumstances, train wrecking, treason, and perjury causing execution. New York’s statute designates as capital crimes first degree murder with 1 of 10 aggravating factors but explicitly excludes persons determined to be mentally retarded (U.S. Dept. of Justice 1998) Since capital punishment was effectively reinstated in 1997, both the number of persons under sentence of death and the number executed have steadily increased. During 1997, 74 prisoners were executed. This was 29 greater than in 1996 and by far the largest number since the reinstatement of capital punishment. By the end of 1997 over 3,300 persons were under sentence of death. This was five times the number under sentence of death in 1980 (U.S. dept. of Justice 1998). As the number of prisoners on death row and the number of executions have increased, public support for capital punishment has also increased. In the very early 1970s about 50 percent of the population supported capital punishment for murder. By the early and mid 1990s just over three-quarters of the population favored the death penalty for a person convicted of murder (Moore 1995). Despite the high degree of support for capital punishment in the mid 1990s, there does exist some interesting variability among sub-populations. In the 1995 poll, 89 percent of Republicans supported the death penalty while only 67 percent of Democrats did. While 81 percent of whites favored the death penalty for murder, only 56 percent of non-whites did. Gender differences were more modest with 80 percent of men and 74 percent of women expressing support (Moore 1995). The goal of the present paper is to examine attitudes toward capital punishment more closely among a specific sub-population--undergraduate students enrolled in an institution of higher education that emphasizes the traditional values of liberal education and is located in the northeastern region of the U.S. The 1995 Gallup Poll reports that 81 percent of those with some college education and 80 percent of those aged 18-29 favor the death penalty (Moore 1995). But these categories are, of course, much broader than our target population. We have two specific objectives. First, we wish to discover 1 whether the level of support for the death penalty within our target population deviates significantly from levels observed in the larger populations of which they are a part. It is our hypothesis that support for capital punishment will be lower in this sub-population. We believe that undergraduate liberal arts students tend to be more idealistic and tend to value human life more highly, at least in the abstract, than the population at-large. As a consequence they will be less likely to regard arguments for capital punishment that are grounded in the deterrence value of applying the ultimate sanction for violent crime as compelling. Second, we wish to explore the factors which cause some students within this target population to be more supportive of capital punishment than others. In the following section we identify those factors which we believe will account for the patterning of support for capital punishment within our target population. Conceptualization There are several factors which we believe will influence the level of support among college students for the death penalty. We have grouped these factors into the two broad categories of exogenous and intervening variables shown in Figure 1. STRONGLY RELIGIOUS DEATH PENALTY HAS DETERRENT VALUE DEMOCRATS RACIAL AND ETHNIC MINORITIES HIGH INCOME FAMILIES MEN INNOCENT ARE RARELY CONVICTED LITTLE DISCRIMINATION OCCURS SUPPORT FOR DEATH PENALTY BELIEVE CHEAPER THAN LIFE IMPRISONMENT PARENTS SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY Positive Link Negative Link Figure 1. Conceptual Model 2 Exogenous Variables The first of our exogenous variables is minority status. We predict that those students who regard themselves as members of an ethnic or racial minority will be more opposed to capital punishment than whites. We have both empirical and conceptual grounds for this hypothesis. Empirically, the 1995 Gallup Poll discovered a 25 point gap in support for capital punishment between whites (81 percent) and non-whites (56 percent) (Moore 1995). This was the largest difference observed in this poll. Conceptually, we believe that much of this difference in attitudes toward capital punishment reflects differences in the degree of faith in the judicial system between these two sub-populations. Racial and ethnic minorities have often been treated unfairly by the criminal justice system historically and frequently perceive themselves still to be vulnerable to unfair treatment. One striking example of this phenomenon is the Rodney King incident in which perceived unfair treatment generated extensive rioting in the Los Angeles urban area a few years ago. Our second exogenous variable is political orientation. The 1995 Gallup Poll found political affiliation to be one of the strongest predictors of support for capital punishment. The support for capital punishment in the 1995 Gallup Poll among those who described themselves as Republican was 89 percent. This was the highest support level among any group identified in that poll. The support among Democrats (67 percent) and Independents (76 percent) was substantially lower (Moore 1995). This is not surprising. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Republican Party positioned itself nationally as the “law and order” or “tough on criminals” party. While we expect the results among contemporary liberal arts students to be consistent with these findings, we anticipate that the differences may be more muted. First, crime is not the salient political issue that it was a few years ago as violent crime rates have declined and the platforms of the two parties have converged. Second, at a liberal arts college in the northeastern United States, the ranks of Republicans are apt to contain greater representation by the more moderate wing of the Republican party than is true nationally. The third exogenous variable of our model is gender. We predict that women will express less support for capital punishment than men. There is empirical grounding for this hypothesis. In the 1995 Gallup Poll there was a 6 percentage point gender difference in the level of support for capital punishment. While 80 percent of males favored the death penalty for a person convicted of murder only 74 percent of women did (Moore 1995). Traditional views of the value orientations of men and women lend conceptual support to these expectations. Women are typically considered to be more nurturing by nature, to be less violent, and to value family relationships more strongly than, for example, career goals. But, over time, as career opportunities for women have widened, women have been encouraged not to conform to gender stereotypes and to pursue alternative goals more vigorously. We might expect, as a result, to observe some convergence in value orientations of young men and women, particularly highly educated young men and women. 3 Our fourth exogenous variable is religion. In general, we would expect those who may be characterized as strongly religious to be less likely to consider the death penalty to be a suitable form of punishment. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that at the core of most religions is the belief that all human life is sacred. However, we also recognize that the doctrines of some religions seem to include some variation of the “eye for an eye” concept of retributive justice which might be expected to weaken opposition to capital punishment. In these faiths the death penalty might be considered acceptable so long as the punishment seems appropriate to the crime. In the United States as a whole, the representation of fundamentalist religious traditions containing the “eye for an eye” concept is apparently quite strong. As a result, support for capital punishment was actually greater in 1995 among those who characterized religion as “very” (75 percent) important to their lives than among those who characterized it as “not very” (69 percent) important to their lives (Moore 1995). But we suspect that, for students of a liberal arts college, the outcome is likely to depend on the region of the country within which the school is set. We hypothesize that, in a northeastern school, students who consider themselves to be more religious will be less supportive of capital punishment. Our fifth exogenous variable is income. We predict that students from more affluent households will be more supportive of capital punishment than those from less affluent households. Wealthy people often view criminals, especially the hardened criminals who tend to be the major candidates for capital punishment, in the abstract as a significant threat to their way of life, rather than as individual human beings with rights and feelings, enmeshed in extenuating circumstances. As a consequence they are less likely to think of such criminals as capable of being rehabilitated by serving prison time. Income is likely to have a second, indirect impact on support for capital punishment. On average it costs over two million dollars to prosecute, convict and execute someone using the death penalty. This leads some to oppose capital punishment, not on moral grounds, but on the grounds of cost-ineffectiveness. The affluent may consider the costineffectiveness argument to be less compelling. In the 1995 Gallup Poll support for capital punishment among income groups of $30,000 and over ranged from 78 to 82 percent. Among income groups under $30,000 support dropped to the 71 to 75 percent range (Moore 1995). It should be noted, however, that this data did not control for race. Our final exogenous variable is parental influence. Undergraduate students are not far removed from the influence of the parental unit. It seems likely that, at this point in their lives, students whose parents were openly opposed to the death penalty would be more likely to oppose it themselves. By contrast, students whose parents favored the death penalty and consistently expressed this position to their children would be more likely to favor the death penalty themselves. 4 Intervening Variables Our causal model has four intervening variables. These variables embrace attitudes toward the criminal justice system and opinions regarding two potentially key capital punishment-related issues. We hypothesize that students who are confident that our criminal justice system rarely finds innocent people guilty or discriminates against particular classes of people will be more likely to support capital punishment than those who consider the system to be significantly vulnerable to error and flawed by discrimination. They will especially support capital punishment if they regard it as having significant value as a deterrent against the commission of violent crime and to be a less costly form of punishment than life imprisonment. We consider some of these intervening variables to be modestly tied to the exogenous variables of our model. For example, we believe it likely that opinions regarding the relatively cost-effectiveness of capital punishment and life imprisonment will cut across the groupings identified through our model’s exogenous variables. At the other extreme, we believe that Democrats (with disproportionate representation of and concern for less mainstream groups), minority students, students from low income households, and women are less likely to be confident of the even-handedness of the criminal justice system. Their skepticism will make them less likely to support capital punishment. Attitudes toward the deterrence value of capital punishment and the likelihood of innocent people being wrongly convicted occupy intermediate positions in this sense. We predict that Democrats, minorities, and students from lower income households will be more likely to perceive the criminal justice system as subject to error and have less confidence in the deterrence value of capital punishment due to their greater sensitivity to the social environmental context within which criminal behavior occurs. References Moore, David, 1995. American firmly support death penalty, The Gallup Poll Monthly, (June 1995): pp. 23-25. U.S. Department of Justice, 1998. Capital Punishment 1997, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. December 1998. (http://www/ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/) 5