the wrongfulness of certain acts. This model assumes
that the public should determine what is and is not a
crime or a serious crime, and public support and com-
pliance with the law will be ensured if the laws mirror
public views. Research on crime seriousness has been
conducted for more than 40 years. This research
started with the belief that a scale of seriousness of
different crimes could inform police, prosecutorial,
and judicial responses to crime, and by matching pub-
lic and professional responses to crime, the public’s
confidence in the system would be warranted.
To determine whether the consensual model could
describe how crimes are defined and justice adminis-
tered in society, researchers tested whether the public
agreed about the seriousness of different acts. Much
research has found that the public perceives violent
crime as more serious than property crimes, which in
turn were perceived as more serious than public-order
and victimless crime. Moreover, comparisons across
Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Holland,
Kuwait, Norway, and the United States indicated that
people from different cultures generally agree about
which crimes are more serious than other crimes.
Americans and Kuwaitis, however, perceived rape to
be more serious than robbery or aggravated battery,
whereas respondents from the Scandinavian countries
and Great Britain indicated that these offenses had the
same level of seriousness. Overall, there is more
agreement than disagreement across countries in the
relative seriousness of different offenses. Men and
women, individuals of different social classes and eth-
nicities, victims and nonvictims, and incarcerated
offenders and nonoffenders also agree on the relative
ranking of different crimes, with the exception of
murder and rape. Women generally have rated rape as
more serious than murder, whereas men rated murder
as more serious than rape.
Though the public demonstrates high consensus
about the relative ranking of different categories of
crime, there is considerably less consensus about
which specific types of white-collar, victimless, and
minor property crimes are more serious within each of
these crime categories. For example, there is less con-
sensus about, and changes across time in, the relative
seriousness of different forms of white-collar crimes,
such as tax fraud and price fixing. The public shows
more agreement about the relative ranking of different
acts of violence, which may partly be due to its greater
familiarity with violent acts. In ranking the serious-
ness of different criminal acts, the public considers the
seriousness of physical injuries, offenders’ intent, andoffenders’ prior criminal record; crimes that are inten-
tional and committed by repeat offenders are per-
ceived as more serious.
Do members of the public, legislators, and crimi-
nal justice professionals hold similar views about the
relative seriousness of different crimes? Research has
found that even though the public ranks all forms of
violence as more serious than property crimes; crim-
inal laws in Canada and the United States provide
higher maximum punishments for some property
crimes, such as car theft and grand larceny, than for
violent crimes such as fondling a child and punching
an intimate partner. Legislators in enacting criminal
laws thus have not mirrored the public’s views of
crime seriousness and give greater priority to protect-
ing property than to personal dignity and freedom
from injury, whereas the public has the opposite pri-
orities. Studies also have found that the public, com-
pared with police officers, agreed on the relative
seriousness of different crime categories but differed
in the absolute seriousness of specific crimes. For
example, the public, compared with police officers,
provided a higher seriousness rating to white-collar
crimes and statutory rape (i.e., an adult having sex
with a consenting minor) and a lower seriousness rat-
ing to residential burglary. Both the police and the
public regarded street crimes as very serious, but the
public also was concerned with white-collar crimes
and statutory rape.Public’s Stereotypes of
Crimes and Criminals
People tend to believe that crime is committed by a
small, easily identifiable group of criminals who are
very likely to commit further crimes in the future. The
majority of the public blame society, unemployment,
neighborhood problems, and lack of parental supervi-
sion as the major causes of crime, whereas about one
third perceive individuals as solely responsible for their
criminal acts and explain crime in terms of lack of
morals, drug use, and mental or personality problems.
More highly educated and self-identified liberal individ-
uals and younger individuals generally attribute more
importance to societal inequities, such as unemploy-
ment and discrimination, in explaining the high crime
rates than do conservatives and older respondents.
Despite these differences across backgrounds, all social
groups assigned greater importance to environmental
factors than to individual dispositional or mental factors
as explanations for why crimes generally occurred.656 ———Public Opinion About CrimeP-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 656