The American journal of orthopsychiatry
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Integration of data on the characteristics of death penalty supporters with data on violence within the family suggests that experience with violence in the family, and the meaning and moral evaluation of punishment and violence learned thereby, lead to support for the death penalty. This paper concludes that the high level of public support for the death penalty may be accounted for in part by the high level of violence within the family and by parental use of retributive physical punishment.
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Am J Orthopsychiatry · Jul 1975
A sociological perspective on public support for capital punishment.
Conceptualizations of public support for the death penalty that suggest that punitiveness, desire for vengenance, authoritarianism, polital conservatism, or other characteristics generally held in low esteem by many in the academic and research communities are the primary or most significant predictors of citizen responses to this issue are challenged. It is proposed instead that fear of crime, perceptions of increasing crime rates, a belief in the efficacy of punishment as a means of deterrence, and a willingness to employ punishment as a response to criminality have a far more important causal role than has previously been recognized.