Punitiveness in Australia: Are Racial Attitudes Important in Understanding Public Punitive Attitudes?

Public attitudes play a role in the development of policy, meaning that what the public think about certain issues (and what shapes these attitudes) form an important part of the broader penal policy environment. Internationally, research has found a relationship between racial attitudes and public punitiveness; however, the relationship between these two types of attitudes is still largely under-researched in Australia. This study had two aims: (1) to understand the relationships between racial essentialism (the belief that racial groups possess fixed traits that determine their abilities and behaviour), attitudes towards Indigenous Australians and punitive attitudes; and (2) to test whether sentencing preferences differ when a justice-involved person is explicitly labelled as Aboriginal, using a vignette experiment. To do this, the study drew on survey data obtained from a representative sample of the Australian public ( N  = 520). The results showed that stronger racial essentialism and more negative attitudes towards Indigenous Australians were associated with greater punitiveness. However, perceptions of rising crime rates and internal attribution of crime emerged as stronger predictors of punitive attitudes than race-related factors. The vignette experiment revealed no significant differences in sentencing preferences when a justice-involved person was explicitly labelled ‘Aboriginal’. These findings suggest that although racial attitudes are associated with punitiveness, public support for harsher punishment is driven more strongly by perceptions of crime rather than characteristics of the justice-involved person themselves.