Americans Currently The Opposite Of Freaking Out About Crime
Who are these people and what have they done with the Americans?
Over the last year or so, we’ve never heard the end of how terrified Americans are of crime and how desperately they crave “tough on crime” policies to scare all the criminals out of doing crimes. According to Republicans, Americans want to see shoplifters tackled in parking lots and sentenced to years in prison, they want to see more cops everywhere, they want to bring mandatory minimums and three strikes laws back into vogue, they want to throw all of the unhoused people into asylums, they want public executions, and they are terrified that Democrats are going to get rid of all the police officers and “fight crime” by handing out flowers and teddy bears to criminals, probably.
But is it possible we’re not as harsh as all that?
A Gallup poll conducted this October shows that only 52 percent of us still think the death penalty is a good idea. Is that a majority? Sure, but it’s a slim one, and it’s the lowest it’s been since it was 50 percent in 1972 — the year the Supreme Court ruled, in Furman v. Georgia, that the “arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” which led to a temporary ban on the practice until 1977.
In 1994, 80 percent of the country was in favor of the death penalty, and support has been steadily decreasing ever since then. It’s not entirely clear why, though I would bet that the popularity of documentaries and podcasts about wrongful convictions has played a pretty big part. I’d say it’s the fact that, since 1972, 200 death row inmates have been exonerated, except I highly doubt that too many people know that.
Another Gallup poll conducted last year also found that the drop in support is generational. There is majority support for it among the Silent Generation (62 percent), Baby Boomers (61 percent), and Gen X (58 percent), while most Millennials (53 percent) and Gen Z (58 percent) are opposed. With each generation, it becomes less and less popular.
It also found that, while Republican Gen X and older support for the death penalty has actually remained steady for the last couple decades, it has plummeted among Democrats of every age. In 2000, 57 percent of Democrats Gen X and older supported it. That number has since fallen to 38 percent. For Democratic Millennials and younger, it’s gone from 45 percent support in 2010 to 27 percent support. It’s even fallen a little among younger Republicans, going from 73 percent support to 69 percent.
Ironically, last year was also the first year since 2012 that the Democratic Party platform did not call for the death penalty to be abolished. Why? Probably because they were terrified of seeming “soft on crime” at a time when the public was thirsting for brutality and dying to see every shoplifter thrown in solitary for life.
But … were they, really? Another recent poll from Gallup found that most Americans do not want any of that. Sixty percent say they don’t want to send military troops to American cities, and 58 percent don’t want the National Guard there, either. Personally, I find those numbers to be disturbingly low, but they’re still clear majorities.
More importantly, a very large majority — 67 percent — prefers that more of our crime fighting dollars and efforts go towards “addressing social and economic problems such as drug addiction, homelessness and mental health,” while only 29 percent want it to go towards strengthening law enforcement. That is a very, very large departure from what Republicans have been insisting (although those numbers have been largely consistent over the last few decades).
Allow me to point out that this is precisely what we mean when we say “defund the police,” which we are never ever ever supposed to say, I guess. We mean that we want to spend our money on solving the social problems that lead to crime, rather than cops who are not obligated to do anything about it until after the fact. Maybe that particular phrase scares people, but this shows that it’s what they actually want.
That poll also showed that, for the first time since the question was first asked in 2000, more people would like to see offenders aged 14-17 be sent to juvenile court rather than being tried as adults.
I would guess that this has something to do with the fact that we are learning more about human brain development and now know that the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and decision making — is not fully mature until a person is in their mid 20s. Although it’s possible that only Democrats have heard about that one, as the percentage of Republicans who want to see juvenile offenders tried as adults has actually increased since the question was last asked.
The United States, by the way, charges juveniles as adults at twice the average rate of the rest of the world. This is something to keep in mind when you consider that another recent poll found that, while the majority of Americans think that our prisons are good at security and keeping people from escaping, they also think we suck at maintaining a safe environment and rehabilitating prisoners.
In fact, only 16 percent of Americans believe that we do an excellent or good job of rehabilitating prisoners, and, frankly, I wonder if the only reason they chose that option is so that our government doesn’t immediately go to the well of “Well, then I guess we need to treat prisoners even worse than we’re treating them now, so they fear coming back!”
After all, that does tend to be our MO.
Despite all of this, you never see anyone running on prison reform, and I think that’s a wasted opportunity. I do think Americans are concerned that people come out of prison worse than when they went in, and that they would like to see more rehabilitation and less torture. In fact, a 2018 poll from the Vera Institute found that 85 percent of us would like prisons to focus on rehabilitation, compared to only 23 who wanted them to focus on punishment. Perhaps even if our prisoners got to end their sentences rehabilitating on a French-style farm. (Can you imagine the squawking from the Right? A reason to be cheerful indeed.)
Another recent Gallup poll shows that for the second year in a row, people are less likely to cry about crime. Very slightly less than half of Americans believe crime is an extremely serious problem and that crime is rising. (It isn’t, and hasn’t been.) This is way down from the 64 percent who believed that a year ago, and the 77 percent who believed that in 2023. (When it also wasn’t. Crime has been steadily falling since the 1990s.)
That poll also showed that the crime Americans are most concerned they would become the victim of is identity theft, followed by being tricked by scammers into sending them money and then “having a school-aged child of yours physically harmed while attending school” — which just may be why a majority of Americans still support stricter gun control laws and an assault weapons ban.
Getting murdered is literally last on the list (which is surprising given the amount of true crime we all watch).
Call me crazy, but it doesn’t actually seem like Americans are walking around in constant, well-founded terror of being a victim of violent crime, or that they believe that the best solution to crime is locking people up and throwing away the key or just straight-up killing them — and it really doesn’t seem as though we are anywhere near as scared or as bloodthirsty or as vengeance-obsessed as Republicans keep insisting we are.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
My mother was brutally murdered in 2004. I live in a death penalty state. My family chose not to pursue it, because it's not what our mother would have wanted. SHE was also against the death penalty. The perp is locked again in prison for 150 years instead. He'll die in jail, with no possibility of parole. (It wasn't his first assault charge, although it was his first outright murder.)
Edit: Thank you all for the kind words.
CNN: DC sandwich thrower found not guilty of assault
Judge Boxwine's record remains unblemished by success.