“It Does Not Reform; It Kills”: Examining the Role of the News, Race, and Crime on U.S. Opinion Towards Solitary Confinement Open Access

Abstract

Political scientists have long studied how public opinion is formed, especially public opinions about government policies and programs. Included in their interests is the study of how public opinions about the criminal justice system in the United States are formed. Although there has been a lot of attention payed by political scientists and other social scientists to public opinions about the criminal justice system, there is a lack of attention payed to public opinions about the use of solitary confinement by prisons and jails in the United States. This thesis empirically examines how a set of theoretically-derived factors, including news consumption, race, and criminal offenses, influence public opinion about solitary confinement. To do this, this study employs a set of news analyses, observing how solitary confinement is both mentioned and framed in the news media. Additionally, the study uses a public opinion survey of a random sample of adult volunteers to understand public opinion about the use of solitary confinement. It focuses on peoples support for or opposition to the use of solitary confinement. Additionally, the study seeks to understand how individual knowledge about racial bias and criminal offenses influence the degrees of support and opposition to the use of solitary confinement in the United States. The findings of the study identify the importance of the news media in understanding public opinion towards solitary confinement but find no significant results on changes in public opinion based on the racial or violence frames in the survey experiment. 

Table of Contents

Introduction.……………………………………………………………………………………....1

Chapter 1. The Correctional Practice and Politics of Solitary Confinement....………………….13

Chapter 2. Punitive Public Opinion and Penal Policy Design....………………………………...24

Chapter 3. News Analyses....…………………………………………………………………….41

Chapter 4. Survey Experiment....………………………………………………………………...49

Conclusion.……………………………………………………………………………………....74

Appendix....………………………………………………………………………………………82

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………101

Tables and Figures:

Figure 1: U.S. State and Federal Prison Population………………………………………4

Figure 2: Study Research Question……………………………………………………….9

Figure 3: Public Opinion, Policy Design, and Punitiveness..............................................39

Figure 4: Mentions of Solitary Confinement, Prison Reform, and Mass Incarceration…44

Figure 5: Solitary Confinement in the Mainstream Commercial Media...........................46

Figure 6: Solitary Confinement Framing in the Mainstream Commercial Media.............47

Table 1: Vignette Treatment Groups by Number of Respondents....................................50

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics of Demographic Variables................................................56

Table 3. Correlation Matrix of Variables...........................................................................58

Table 4. Descriptive Statistics of Independent Variables..................................................62

Table 5. Descriptive Statistics of Dependent Variables.....................................................64

Table 6. “Do you support the use of Solitary Confinement in the U.S. prison system?”..65

Table 7. “Do you support the use of Solitary Confinement in the U.S. prison system?”..67

Table 8. Racial Resentment and Treatment Variables.......................................................67

Table 9. Results of Ordinal Logit Models.........................................................................69

Table 10: Solitary Confinement, Prison Reform, and Mass Incarceration in the News....82

Figure 7: Histogram of Age...............................................................................................83

Figure 8: Histogram of Racial Identity..............................................................................83

Figure 9: Histogram of Gender..........................................................................................84

Figure 10: Histogram of Education....................................................................................84

Figure 11: Histogram of Income........................................................................................85

Figure 12: Histogram of Ideology......................................................................................85

Figure 13: Histogram of Party Identification.....................................................................86

Table 11: Regression Table of Opinion on Killing another Inmate...................................87

Table 12: Regression Table of Opinion on Mental Health Considerations.......................88

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Political Science
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General
Keyword	Solitary
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Dr. Michael Leo Owens, Emory University
Committee Members	Dr. Daniel LaChance , Emory University Dr. Andra Gillespie , Emory University

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