Editorial Introduction to Special Issue of Justice Quarterly 2022 Public Opinion and Personal Perspectives: Implications for Crime and Justice

The goals of this special issue are (1) to publish sound, empirical and analytical public opinion research about crime that (2) provides practical policy or programming implications for decisionmakers and practitioners who work in the field of criminal justice. I believe the collection of articles presented here do an excellent job of meeting these two goals. As you may know, I have spent most of my career working to study reactions to crime, whether it be through evaluations of criminal and juvenile justice practice or examining public attitudes, worries, and/or behaviors related to crime and gangs. I was trained in Social Ecology, which hopes to use interdisciplinary perspectives to examine and impact important community problems, or as the University of California, Irvine now succinctly terms it “science driving solutions” (https://socialecology.uci.edu/). This notion is at the core of the goals for the special issue. Understanding the causes and effects of public attitudes matters because policymakers often argue that public experiences with and opinions about crime necessitate that we do something to curb the crime problem. That is, they periodically but consistently over time have argued that the public is terrorized by crime and often that people therefore necessarily want harsh punishments. For example, a recent resolution introduced in the U.S House of Representatives in the Summer of 2022 used fear of crime as one justification for suggesting a change from the policy focus on gun control to concentrating “on the criminals perpetuating violence, insecurity, and fear across the United States” (“Urging the Development of a Strategy to Counter the Rise of Violent Crime Across the United States,” 2022, p. 4). This effort was despite research evidence that some gun control policies, such as increasing sentences for violent crimes involving guns, prohibiting gun possession for those who commit domestic violence, and limiting concealed carry in public, make a difference (Cook & Donohue, 2017). In other words, the policy focused on blame and public fear to justify the change rather than gun control science. In terms of the public’s feelings and opinions, it is also not clear that policymakers know the complexities of the causes and consequences of fear and public attitudes about crime that they often cite as so relevant. This is despite decades of scholarly research that has produced a wealth of