Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? A Study in Social Valuation

Abstract

There is a significant discrepancy between the law and popular judgment as to how the law should be applied in assigning punishments for thirteen studied felonies. This probably reflects "cultural lag" in the law as compared to pupular conceptions, although the cases studied are too unrepresentative for generalization. Background characteristics of the judges are related to the judgments made. Many subjects were willing to be deliberately nonequalitarian in punishing convicted criminals from different classes in the population. A technique is presented for ascertaining the mental equivalency of two logically noncomparable scales of values.