Public Opinion

Perhaps no other topic in contemporary America better illustrates the potential, the use, and the misuse of public opinion than crime, delinquency, and criminal justice. There are several reasons why crime and justice issues are invaluable for examining the role of public opinion. First, crime and justice issues are relevant and salient to Americans. Second, public safety and punishment of wrongdoers are at the core of the political and ideological doctrines that unite and divide Americans and their political parties. Third, there is substantial disagreement about methods to achieve them, but Americans know and can articulate the results that they want from crime policy and from the criminal justice system. Fourth, political leaders are highly responsive to public concerns about crime-related issues.

The modern sample survey is a descendant of “straw polls,” a fixture of American political life in the 1820s. Straw polls became standard fare in newspaper coverage of elections throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, until the Literary Digest fiasco of 1936. The Literary Digest distributed ballots concerning public attitudes toward Prohibition in the 1920s. By 1936, the huge Digest poll had correctly predicted each presidential election winner since 1920. As Bradburn and Sudman (1988) recount,

In the early 1940s, the use of survey research by political leaders, government agencies, and the media expanded. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau were early leaders in the development of survey methods. During World War II, the research branch of the U.S. Army produced more than 300 reports on attitudes of military personnel, including studies of mental health, stress, morale, and other issues of concern to social scientists during and after the war (Sudman and Bradburn 1987).

The polling industry received an embarrassing setback in 1948, when all three national polling organizations (Gallup, Roper, and Crossley) predicted Thomas E. Dewey's victory over Harry Truman. Truman received 49.5 percent of the total presidential vote to Dewey's 45.1 percent. The analyses of “what went wrong” identified several problems, including stopping interviewing too soon prior to election day and failing to detect the leanings of undecided respondents. Improvements to counter these problems include “tracking polls” that monitor shifts in public perceptions of candidates and more sophisticated area sampling methods.

Since 1960, there has been much wider use of surveys and polls. These include surveys that monitor employment and economic indicators, health care use patterns, self-reported drug use, and the National Criminal Victimization Survey, conducted annually by the Census Bureau for the Department of Justice. Survey data collected from offenders, victims, and citizens are now used to supplement the “official” portrait of the nature of crime and characteristics of criminals drawn from police arrest statistics. One of the premises of community policing strategies in law enforcement is that public fear of crime, measured by sample surveys of community residents, is as important an indicator of the quality of life as are official crime statistics.

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