How can we lead people toward supporting criminal justice system reform? In our third installment on public safety,  we reveal the findings of our latest FrameWorks research report, Strengthen Communities, Educate Children and Prevent Crime: A Communications Analysis of Peer Discourse Sessions on Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform. This report presents the results from a series of six peer discourse sessions conducted with groups of civically engaged Americans across the country.

What are peer discourse sessions? Peer discourse sessions provide an opportunity to see how cultural models function in settings that approximate the social contexts in which discussions about public safety and the criminal justice system naturally occur. Using this method, the Institute is able to:

• Capture and identify the public discourse about public safety and the justice system;
• Show which of the cultural models available in public thinking become dominant in a broader social context; and,
• Examine whether intentionally priming conversations can create a substantively different and/or more progressive public conversation about public safety and reform.

In this study, we found that the dominant cultural models that structure public thinking about public safety are extremely powerful, highly available, and readily employed. However, we were able to shift some thinking on this issue by introducing two values into conversations during our sessions: safety and prevention.

Safety emerged as a very useful value to engage participants in a constructive conversation about criminal justice reform. Participants deemed “safety” a core requirement and value for all communities. This value helped participants recognize variations and inequities in public safety across places, which translated into productive talk about the need to reform the system and improve its efficiency and fairness.

The value of Prevention also had a positive effect in helping people reason about the necessity of reforming and addressing the priorities of the criminal justice system. To the extent that Americans believe the current system does not prevent crime and that chances can be made to reduce crime, they are open to supporting criminal justice reform.

When presented with specific reform ideas such as reduced sentencing for nonviolent crime, enhanced community policing, and a dedicated and developmentally sensitive juvenile justice system, participants rallied around Prevention as a way to link these policies together to improve the system and reducing crime. This suggests that Prevention can serve as an important framing value for getting people to support reforms of both the adult and juvenile systems.

Frameworks is continuing work in this direction and we look forward to sharing more of our findings on how to best frame criminal justice reform in the near future. You can find more of our related research on our new public safety issue page. 

Imagine an advocacy campaign for criminal justice reform that goes something like this…

 Jobs not jails. Schools not cells.

Let’s empower our youth to choose success by building the good schools and jobs opportunities they deserve.

On the face of it, that seems like a pretty solid message.  It points to the importance of community factors like schooling and employment, even as it appeals to a strong ethic of success that resonates with most Americans.  Do a quick review of our media landscape, and it’s pretty clear that Americans love stories about individuals who take responsibility for their lives and find success through hard work and good decision-making. So what if we can get people thinking about criminal justice reform by appealing to this strong individualist sensibility?  Seems like that could work, right?

Not so fast…

In its research on how Americans think about public safety and the criminal justice system, conducted with funding from the Ford Foundation and in collaboration with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at the Harvard Law School, and Behind the Cycle, the criminal justice advocacy group, the FrameWorks Institute has found that members of the American public consistently apply a rational actor model to their thinking about how and why crime happens.  As our report suggests, when applying this model, Americans “explained that individuals commit crimes because they have weighed the costs, benefits and risks associated with an act and then made a conscious choice or decision to break the law.”  In short, according to this model, most people who commit crimes choose to do so.

Our research showed two further conclusions that flowed from this rational actor model, both of which emerged as dominant patterns of thinking among members of the American public.

1. Because the model suggests that individuals consciously choose to commit crimes, then it’s only “right” that they be held fully responsible for their actions as individuals.
2. The only way to improve public safety is to increase mechanisms of deterrence – in particular by making punishments harsher.

To quote again from the report:

“If crime results from a conscious calculation of weighted costs and benefits, increasing the costs through harsher punishments becomes the logical solution to the problem. Moreover, the application of the rational-actor model in thinking about causation renders a host of alternative solutions — things like more appropriate sentencing or alternatives to incarceration — difficult to rationalize and support.”

In short, our research suggests that if and when this rational actor model is triggered in thinking, the public will quickly (1) default to blaming individuals for crime, muting attention to systemic and ecological factors, and (2) then be predisposed to calls for more punitive approaches to improving public safety via harsher mechanisms in the criminal justice system.

So what are the communications implications?

1. Avoid invoking “decision-making” or “good choices” in your communications.   They will focus attention on the individual actor and mute attention to macro-forces that are in play.
2. Give attention to systemic and ecological factors – economic, educational, and community-level.  Invoke the value of prevention at these systems levels.

It’s important to note that the public does recognize that our criminal justice system needs reform, including the recognition that some crimes are being punished too harshly and that the system often does not live up to the standard of fairness. So there are shared contours in public thinking that show promise for advocacy communications efforts.  The FrameWorks report Caning, Context and Class: Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understandings of Public Safety describes these contours and provides an early set of communications recommendations.  This report is an early part of a larger, multi-method project that is still underway and which seeks to develop more effective ways to communicate about the challenges facing America’s criminal justice system and to provide justice reform advocates with specific recommendations for reframing the issue of public safety. So more research findings and recommendations are still to come…

In the meantime, be sure to steer clear of the rational actor trap!

How do we effectively communicate to the public about the need to reform the criminal justice system? The FrameWorks Institute is working on a new project to provide a model for responding to the communications opportunities and challenges confronting criminal justice reform advocates.

There are many different ways experts and advocates might tell the story about the need to reform the criminal justice system. Some believe that a historical narrative about the legacies of a racial caste system is necessary in order to point to the racial disparities and bias that persist in today’s system.  Others believe that the current economic environment offers an opportunity to tell the American public how incredibly broken the current criminal justice system is.  Still others think we need to avoid all of these approaches, take the moral high ground, and simply tell a narrative about basic human rights.  Unfortunately, the cacophony of these many different stories often leaves the public confused and unsure as to why criminal justice reform is important and much needed.

For FrameWorks, a part of the answer to this question is that the field of public safety and criminal justice needs a stronger, more consistent, and strategic communications approach if it is to make headway on its goal of instituting a reformed criminal justice agenda.

Last month, FrameWorks published three reports on this issue. They include:

1- Public Safety: Framing a Reform Agenda

2- Caning, Context and Class – Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understandings of Public Safety

3 - Strengthen Communities, Educate Children and Prevent Crime: A Communications Analysis of Peer Discourse Sessions on Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform.

(You can view our new public safety issue page here: http://frameworksinstitute.org/pubsafety.html)

The first report, Public Safety: Framing a Reform Agenda, is an analysis of the story of the field of public safety and criminal justice as told through expert and advocate communications materials, policy briefings, legislative testimony and websites.

Here are a few highlights:

• Experts see that the law enforcement, sentencing, and corrections features of the criminal justice system all impact public safety, especially on the community-level;
• Experts believe that crime stems largely from systemic and ecological factors — economic, educational, and the inequitable distribution of public services, including support services;
• Rates of incarceration have grown 5-fold in the past 30 years due to, they believe, flawed, harsh, and biased sentencing policies, and in conjunction with the rise of the for-profit prison industry;
• They see the criminal justice system, both adult and juvenile, is both unfair and unaccountable. We lack an evidence-base for providing accountability to better manage it;
• They believe people of color, especially young black and Latino men, and immigrants are targeted; and
• They see that the quality of the system needs to be addressed in terms of policy priorities, data management, the relationship between the adult and juvenile systems, sentencing, and in a host of other ways.

The findings presented in this report constitute a great starting point for evaluating where the public is in its thinking and to what extent does the public understand features of the criminal justice system.

At this point, the research is poised to address these additional questions: How does the public then respond to experts’ and advocates’ narratives? What assumptions does the public bring to their understanding about criminal justice reform? And, can these experts’ and advocates’ narratives can be used to cultivate public support for reforming criminal justice? If so, how?

In two upcoming posts, we will highlight the ongoing research that addresses these critical questions.