Professor Mike Hough: Public opinion and sentencing reform
One theme in ICPR’s evidence to the Independent Sentencing Review was about the ways in which public opinion should – and shouldn’t – shape sentencing policy, and this blog summarises the evidence we offered on this.
Crime trends
Crime in England and Wales increased over the post-war period until 1995, and public concern about crime was well-founded. In this country as elsewhere, most forms of violence and property crime have since fallen. There are some exceptions, notably new forms of cyber-enabled crimes, such as e-fraud, and internet-based child sexual abuse. The recent upturn in police-recorded shoplifting and knife crime are also very probably real. However, these trends are greatly offset by the fall in other forms of crime over the thirty-year period from 1995, as measured by the Crime Survey in England and Wales (CSEW).
Public attitudes on crime and punishment
Surprisingly, public views on crime trends have changed little since the early 1990s. Few people have noticed the falls in crime. For example, a survey in 2021 showed that 60 per cent of the public in England and Wales wrongly believed that crime rates across the nation were higher than twenty-five years ago. This is unsurprising. People get information about national crime trends from news outlets, which focus on attention-grabbing stories. Alarming crime stories make good headlines. Politicians have also been very hesitant to correct these misperceptions, as this would run the risk of looking complacent about what are felt to be real problems.
If the public have failed to notice the falls in crime, they have also shown systematic misperceptions about the severity of court punishments. Most people have over time consistently underestimated the imprisonment rate for a range of crimes. Three quarters of the public in 2021 thought that average sentence severity had fallen. In fact, average prison sentences have increased steadily, from 14 months in 2009 to 19 months in 2019, an increase of 37 per cent. The average sentence length for manslaughter almost doubled between 2007 and 2017. So the toughening up of sentencing has gone almost completely unnoticed by the public.
Do public preferences match court practice?
If surveys ask the British public general questions such as ‘Are the courts too lenient, too harsh, or about right?’, the weight of opinion will always be that they are too lenient. The BCS/CSEW has routinely found that three-quarters of the population say that the courts are too lenient. The Sentencing Academy survey in 2021 found that 76 per cent thought this.
Research can side-step these problems of public ignorance and misperception about sentencing if respondents are presented with vignettes of particular offenders convicted of specific crimes and asked to “pass sentence”: when this is done, by the CSEW and other surveys, average public preferences align much more closely with sentencing practice.
So research qualifies the conventional view that the public is deeply punitive towards offenders. Simple questions yield simple—and largely negative—answers. However, when people are asked to deliberate about particular cases, a more nuanced picture emerges, many people being less tough-minded than sentencers. What is totally clear is that the public is so poorly informed about sentencing practice that even quite large increases in sentence severity will go totally unnoticed.
Democratic responsiveness or penal populism?
Much of the rapid increase in the prison population rate in England and Wales dates from the mid-1990s, reflecting the courts’ imposition of more, and longer, prison sentences. The policy changes giving rise to longer sentences were introduced by both Conservative and Labour governments in efforts to demonstrate responsiveness to public concern about crime – and to show that they could “out-tough” their political opponents on sentencing policy.
We are very clear that politicians would be failing in their democratic duty to ignore popular calls for tough sentencing if it were true that people were well informed both about the overall fall in crime rates in England and Wales and the real surge in sentencing severity.
However, this is not the case, and we hope that politicians will begin to resist the temptation to ‘bank’ the electoral payoffs from introducing ‘tough on crime’ policies which are unsupported by the evidence on crime and sentencing trends.
Further reading
Hough, M. and Roberts, J. V. (2023) ‘Public Knowledge and Opinion, Crime, and Criminal Justice’, in (eds, Liebling, A., Maruna, S. and McAra, L.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Seventh Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198860914
Hough, M. (2025) ‘Thirty-five Years of Research on Attitudes to Punishment’, in (Eds G. Watson and M. Manikis) Sentencing, Public Opinion and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Julian V Roberts, Oxford: Oxford University Press.