Neither Dupes, Nor Pipers: Violent Crime, Public Sentiment and the Political Origins of Mass Incarceration in

the United States

Reviewer Affiliation
University of Chicago
Manuscript ID:
LSI-19-0069
Manuscript type
Research Article
Keywords
Penal policy, Violent crime, Public opinion
Date Assigned:
15-Jul-2019
Date Review Returned:
21-Aug-2019

Not
Questionnaire Yes No
applicable

Does the manuscript make an original and significant theoretical contribution to warrant
publication?

Does the manuscript make an original and significant methodological contribution to

warrant publication?

Are the data original and significant to warrant publication?

Is the thesis significant and concisely stated?

Is the methodology described comprehensively?

Are the interpretations and conclusions justified by the analyses and methods?

Is adequate reference made to other work in the field?

Is the writing clear?

Does the Abstract clearly and accurately describe the content of the article?

Manuscript Structure

Length of article is: Adequate

Number of tables is: Adequate

Number of figures is: Adequate

Recommendation
Reject

Confidential Comments to the Editor

Comments to the Author

This article claims to argue that the new punitive policies of the 1960s and 70s were neither driven by public
concern about crime (public leading the politicians), nor was concern about crime stoked by politicians with a
punitive agenda (politicians leading the public). Instead the author claims that public opinion about crime (and
indeed crime itself) was simply not relevant to the dramatic changes to US penal policy in the 1960s and 1970s
(the author does not present a thesis about what DID cause those changes, which leaves the reader somewhat
bemused as to the broader research project that this article appears to be part of).

This argument, however, is not well-supported by the evidence presented by the author. Nor does the author do
an adequate job in addressing the existing literature and the counter-evidence presented with it.

First, as the author admits in the conclusion, the evidence the author presents on the disconnect between crime
and public concern about crime does not have any bearing on the thesis that politicians led the public in this
matter, since the author has no independent measure of the preferences of politicians to compare with levels of
public concern. If anything the supposed disconnect between crime and levels of public concern about crime
might be taken as prima facia support for the thesis that politicians led the public.

Second, the evidence presented by the author on the disconnect between crime and public concern about crime
is very weak. The author relies on trends in only one question asked by Gallup: ‘What do you think is the most
important problem facing this country today?’ As other scholars have noted (Enns), this question is a poor gage
of absolute levels of concern about crime, since the answer will depend on independent changes in the level of
concern about other issues. Public concern about crime may be rising even as the percentage who answer
"crime" to this question is falling if other concerns are rising faster.

The author's analysis of this trend also falls far short of the methodological standards set by current public
opinion research. There is no consideration of error, lag structure, autocorrelation, or different periods over which
the correlation can be analyzed. The textual description of the trend analysis amounts to eyeballing a time series
with an inconsistent Y axis (an index should have been used) and reporting a single correlation coefficient. The
robustness checks are also inadequate since they consider other crime trends but not other crime-relevant
questions asked by opinion polls, such that measurement error in the "most important problem" question is not
addressed at all.

Finally the author fails to adequately address the leading research on public opinion on crime. The discussion of
Peter Enns' work is confined to the conclusion, when given the methodological sophistication and broad influence
of that work, and its opposite conclusions from the author, it should be the primary interlocutor for this essay. The
author's discussion of the political history literature is also inadequate. There is no mention, for instance, of
Michael Flamm's recent monograph, which again draws the opposite conclusions from the author. For this article
to be published in a peer reviewed journal it would have to clearly show where both Enns and Flamm go wrong.
The parenthesis dismissing Enns on the basis of unspecified archival research is not adequate to do this.
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Author's Response
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