ABSTRACT

The first major poll carried out to assess people’s perceptions of crime, the courts, sentencing and prisons in the UK was conducted by the Prison Reform Trust in 1982 (Shaw, 1982). In the 20 or so years that have followed, academic researchers, government departments, pressure groups, and the print and broadcast media have carried out frequent surveys to explore the range and depth of public feelings about the ‘fear of crime’, law-breaking and the adequacy of criminal justice responses. Whilst such research has become ever more sophisticated, ‘public opinion’ remains more often invoked than understood in much the same way in the current period as it was in 1982. Sentencers, politicians, practitioners, penal reformers and criminologists, writing from a variety of perspectives, with a greater or lesser degree of informed research, remain apt to make assessments about what the public will or will not tolerate where penal policy and criminal justice disposals are concerned. Governments in the UK and the USA, for example, have justified harsher penalties, more austere regimes and the removal of rights from suspects, defendants and prisoners on the grounds that they are satisfying public opinion. While some professional interests, pressure groups and academic criminologists have been articulate in their opposition to such shifts towards punitiveness and populism, nevertheless a tendency to view public opinion in an undifferentiated way remains. In many senses this is surprising: recorded crime statistics, their changing trends and the explanations offered for them receive regular interrogation, yet such a response is often conspicuously absent when public opinion polls and surveys are discussed. Also, and perhaps less surprisingly, while many of the same commentators have advocated or supported greater degrees of public involvement in criminal justice processes in principle, there remains widespread scepticism about and suspicion of public involvement in such decision-making.