Why Whites Favor Spending More Money to Fight Crime: The Role of Racial Prejudice

Abstract

A “get-tough” approach has guided criminal justice policy in the United States since the 1970s. This approach has involved hiring more police, building more prisons, and handing out longer and more certain prison terms for a variety of offenses. Although scholars dispute the impact of such measures, they generally agree that these steps stem in part from widespread public concern over crime and the desire that the criminal justice system treat suspects and criminals more punitively. Prior research, however, has found that racial prejudice partly underlies punitive sentiments among the public. This article extends this work into another important dimension of public opinion on crime, the view that the criminal justice system needs more money to fight crime. We investigate a link between racial prejudice and this view using data on white Americans in the 2000 General Social Survey. We find that whites who perceive African Americans as more violent are more likely to want more money spent on crime. In specifying this general result, we find further that this relationship is limited to one segment of whites: the most racially prejudiced. Final remarks address the theoretical and pragmatic implications of these findings.

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