Yleisökäsitykset valvontarangaistuksesta

Abstrakti

Public attitudes toward home detention

This article reports on a study that surveyed public attitudes toward home detention. The results show that the public favoured home detention instead of incarceration in a vignette case which provided the respondents with relevant information about the criminal case and the sanction. Penal attitudes were interpreted within a penal theory framework. The authors found that the public sets two main objectives for home detention: It must work both as punishment and as rehabilitation. In addition, the results show that punitive penal attitudes and trust in the legal system are connected to the perceptions of whether home detention meets these objectives. A punitive attitude weakens a lay person’s belief that home detention will meet its objectives, whereas trust in the legal system strengthens this belief.