Attitudes Towards the Amnesty Act: A Multivariate Analysis of Determinants of Attitudes

The practice of early release or sentence commutation of prisoners through paroles or amnesties has existed for many decades. Public opinion of it, however, has rarely been empirically measured. This is intriguing, given the richness of the literature on punitiveness and attitudes towards prisoners, who stand at the centre of these measures. Drawing on existing theories from legitimacy, punitiveness and attitudes towards prisoners literature, as well as crime salience theories, this survey seeks to explain varying levels of support or opposition of students at two urban universities in Azerbaijan towards the recently enacted Amnesty Act, which led to the early release of 5,000 inmates. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first criminological attempt to identify the determinants of attitudes towards amnesty. Six ordinal regression models were estimated in a stepwise approach. When all variables are taken into account, the predictors explained nearly 40% of the variation. Most of it were attributed to the belief in the transparency and fairness of the implementation of Amnesty and what students think of the incarcerated people.