Fear or Loathing in the United States? Public Opinion and the Rise of Racial Disparity in Mass Incarceration, 1978–2015

Abstract

Abstract Adefining characteristic of mass incarceration is the overwhelming racial disparity in US prison populations. Yet, little research has examined the role of public attitudes in the growth of racial disparity in incarceration rates during the prison boom. This article considers the influence of explicit and modern forms of prejudice and traces a portion of the rise in racial disparity in incarceration rates to historically high levels of fear of crime. It analyzes roughly forty years of annual data on incarceration at the state level, leveraging recent methodological developments for polling data to construct longitudinal measures of state public opinion from 386,751 individual survey responses to a pooled sample of 102 national surveys. Results from panel models show that public fear of crime played a larger role in explaining rising racial disparity in incarceration rates than explicit prejudice or laissez-faire racial attitudes. Further analyses demonstrate that fear of crime mediates a sizable portion of the effect of race-specific offending. These findings reveal that it is fear of crime and its radicalized overtones, rather than explicit or laissez-faire racial attitudes, that contributes to much of the observed racial inequality in the criminal justice system.