Mass Incarceration and Public Opinion on Crime and Justice
Elizabeth R. Turner · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016
Using deliberative practices to produce and capture a seemingly more refined form of public opinion on matters of penal policy and practice has been proposed as an antidote to penal populism. However, critics argue that while deliberation might provide useful insights into the way in which opinion is formed, it cannot replace conventional survey-based approaches as these capture opinion as it “really” is, whereas deliberation creates a hypothetical public. This chapter argues that this criticism misrepresents both the research methods examined and the realities they purport to represent. Drawing on ideas emanating from the field of science and technology studies, the chapter demonstrates that different methods for gauging public opinion enact different kinds of democratic realities. It concludes that to nurture a more deliberative and less punitive future for penal politics it is necessary to make space for what can be called a “politics of the real.”