Public attitudes to sentencing in Canada: exploring recent findings.

Introduction

Public attitudes toward sentencing in Canada have been the subject of systematic research for well over a generation now--beginning with the Legal Research Institute Survey conducted in 1978 (reported in Moore 1985). One reason for this interest on the part of researchers is that sentencing has always placed high on the public criminal justice agenda. This is particularly true at the present. Several specific issues, including mandatory sentencing, conditional sentencing, and parole, have attracted newspaper headlines and generated public and political discussion in recent years. The result has been an increase in calls for punitive sentencing reforms, including the expansion of the use and severity of mandatory sentencing, the elimination of conditional sentences for a range of offences, and the abolition of statutory release. In 2006 the federal government introduced legislation to expand the number and severity of mandatory sentences of imprisonment (see below). This article examines the state of public attitudes regarding three of the most important contemporary sentencing issues: mandatory sentencing; sentencing objectives; and sentence severity.

Mandatory sentencing

Most Western nations have enacted mandatory sentencing legislation in recent years. These laws usually focus on serious violent and repeat offenders (see Roberts 2005 for a review of representative statutes). The mandatory sentences of imprisonment in some jurisdictions are particularly severe. For example, in South Africa, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 105 of 1997 created long mandatory sentences of imprisonment for a range of offences, particularly when the offender has previous convictions. An offender convicted of robbery for the third or subsequent occasion must be sentenced to at least 25 years in prison. Mandatory sentencing laws have usually been introduced to address escalating crime rates (or perceptions of rising crime rates) and to respond to public pressure to make the sentencing process harsher (Roberts, Stalans, Indermaur, and Hough 2003).

For many politicians, mandatory sentences represent a convenient, expeditious, and popular response to a specific crime problem (see discussion in Doob and Cesaroni 2001). Since polls repeatedly show that the public believes sentencing to be excessively lenient, any reform that promises greater severity is perceived to be consistent with public opinion. For example, an Australian prime minister stated several years ago that he was "not surprised at the overwhelming support that Australians have shown for the introduction of mandatory sentencing laws" (Burke 2000, 1). He was referring, however, not to a scientific survey using a representative sample but simply to a tabloid newspaper initiative in which interested readers had been asked to express their opinions on the issue. Politicians' interpretation of public opinion in this area may be erroneous; public support for mandatory sentencing may be not as strong as many suppose. Contrary evidence can be found in a poll conducted in the United States in 1999, which found that more than half of the sample stated that they would be more likely to vote for a politician who advocated increasing judicial discretion--the antithesis to mandatory sentencing (Zogby International 1999).