Attitudes to Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1964–2023: A Reinterpretation of the 1980s and a Model of Interactions Between Concern, Punitiveness and Prioritization

This paper assembles the largest set of British survey questions about criminal justice to date (1,190 question-year pairs) and uses it to measure crime concern, punitiveness, support for the death penalty and the prioritization of crime as a social issue from the 1960s to today. Results lend some support to existing narratives of public opinion, showing that concern and prioritization grew steadily through the 1970s before declining from the mid-2000s, and that support for the death penalty has been falling since at least the 1960s. But they contradict orthodox accounts of the 1980s as a period of rising punitiveness, showing instead that support for tougher policing and sentencing was highly volatile and subject to significant demographic variation until the late 1990s. I also show that crime concern is particularly responsive to the true rate of crime and propose a model for the interaction between these different strands of public opinion.