Poster Paper:
Punitiveness and Mass Incarceration: Revisiting Enns' Analysis on the Link Between Public Opinion and Incarceration
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
in the world. In “The Public’s Increasing Punitiveness and Its Influence on Mass
Incarceration in the United States”, Peter Enns attempts to empirically unveil plausible
relationships that led the to the adoption of punitive criminal justice policies. Focusing
on national survey responses as a proxy for public opinion, Enns finds a significant
relationship between increasing punitive public opinions and the adoption of more
punitive criminal justice policies at the federal level. Building on Enns’ findings, we
extend Enns’ analysis by 1) focusing on changes in incarceration rates at the state and
regional levels, 2) testing for significant correlations between police presence and
changes in incarceration, and 3) adapting a new metric of punitiveness based on Enns’
Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Our results provide support for Enns’ original findings,
and we discover that there is a significant relationship between police presence and
changes in the incarceration rate at the state and regional levels using panel data from
1975-2002.
