Words and thoughts

A few days ago, Jason Stanley and David Beaver had a piece in the New York Times saying that the words used to talk about things influence the way that people think about them.  The general point is reasonable, but one of their examples seemed strange:

"In the United States, we had the 'superpredator' theory. Violent-crime rates in the country started dropping in 1993 and continued dropping throughout the decade. And yet, in 1996, criminologists began spreading an unjustified panic about so-called superpredators — 'hardened, remorseless juveniles,' according to the political scientist John DiIulio — that led to a wave of new state laws with harsh sentences for minors. Politicians’ descriptions of young black men as 'thugs' and 'gang members' in the 1990s helped transform the United States into the country with the world’s highest incarceration rate."

But the big increase in the incarceration rate was in the 1970s and 1980s--by the beginning of the 1990s, the United States already had the highest incarceration rate among major nations of the world.  The 1990s didn't "transform" the United States:  the incarceration rate continued to increase, but not as fast as before (see this site for detailed statistics). 

In order to see what difference criminologists and politicians made, we can look at answers to a question from the General Social Survey (and before that, the Gallup Poll):  whether "courts in this area deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals?"  The means by year, counting "not harshly enough" as +1, about right (volunteered) as 0, and "too harshly" as -1:

Opinions moved in the "too harsh" direction in the late 1960s and 1970s, then stayed about the same from 1978 to 1994.  Between 1994 and 1996, they moved away from that position, and have continued to do so ever since.  That is, they started moving in a less punitive direction at exactly the time the Stanley and Beaver say that criminologists were spreading panic. 

So why did opinions change?  The next graph includes the homicide rate (lagged one year):

The figure suggests a simple story: people became more punitive when the homicide rate (or more broadly, the crime rate) increased and less punitive when it declined. 


[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]