When we do not care about what happens to "criminals": How character judgments influence indifference to incidental suffering in the criminal justice system.

Abstract

Objective: Sometimes people fail to sympathize-and may even relish-when people in the criminal justice system experience harms such as police brutality or inadequate care while in custody. These are harms that occur incidentally to one's involvement with the criminal justice system, as they are not prescribed by laws associated with arrest or conviction. The current research explores what causes people to justify such legally illegitimate harms.

Hypotheses: We expected that when people make essentialized character-based attributions about people who commit crimes (e.g., labeling them as fundamentally and enduringly "bad"), this can lead them to view incidental harms as deserved punishment.

Method and results: In Study 1 (N = 49), we provide initial qualitative evidence for this idea: participants who expressed indifference toward the suffering of incarcerated individuals tended to rationalize such suffering as punishment for perceived immoral character. In Study 2 (N = 258), the perception that people who commit crimes have an underlying and unchanging "criminal" character was positively related to tolerance for incidental suffering. In Study 3 (N = 537), describing a person's crime as stemming from an unchangeable immoral character increased participants' tolerance for incidental harms through heightened perceptions of the person's ongoing dangerousness. However, the unchangeable immoral character also appeared to reduce tolerance for harms through a competing, unexplained pathway.

Conclusions: Taken together, the findings underscore the complex ways in which character-based explanations for crime influence whether justice-involved individuals are seen as deserving of moral concern. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).