Do People’s Perceptions of the Causes of Crime and Punishment Align with Reality?

Do people’s perceptions of the causes of crime and punishment align with reality? The current work aimed to address this question. First, the current work reviewed extant literature from various areas of psychology (developmental, social, cognitive) on laypeople’s perceptions of why others become incarcerated. This work shows that people largely attribute incarceration to individual-level factors (e.g., bad behaviors, bad morals). Next, the current work reviewed literature examining the real factors that underlie why people come in contact with the criminal legal system. Specifically, this work largely suggests that criminal legal system contact stems from factors outside the individual, such as negative interpersonal and societal circumstances. Together, these separate streams of evidence suggest that laypeople’s perceptions of the causes for crime and punishment do not align with reality. In other words, people’s reasoning about the criminal justice system seems to be inaccurate. In unearthing this novel discovery, the current work highlights the dire need to help correct laypeople’s faulty assumptions. Implications for the potential benefits of correcting such assumptions are discussed.