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...an offender's ethnicity had no direct effect on judgements of responsibility and sentence severity, the causal factors for an offence were attributed as more stable when the offender was identified as an Indigenous Australian. Responsibility was predicted by attributions of controllability for both Anglo-Australian and Indigenous offenders, and locus of control for Indigenous offenders only. Severity of sentence was predicted by locus of control for both Anglo-Australian and Indigenous offenders; stability for Indigenous offenders; and being male and responding to a violent offence for Anglo-Australian offenders. A number of theoretical and practical implications arising from these findings are discussed.
Key words: attribution theory, controllability, Indigenous Australians, judgment making, locus of control, prejudice, responsibility, severity of sentence, stability.
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Previous psychological research confirms that a large amount of prejudice toward Indigenous people exists in the Australian community (e.g., Dunn, Forrest, Burnley, & McDonald, 2004; Pedersen, Beven, Walker, & Griffiths, 2004). Few areas reflect this discrepancy more clearly than the continuing trend of Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. But despite the large proportion of Indigenous Australians in contact with the criminal justice system, few studies have explored community attitudes to Indigenous Australians and their interaction with the criminal justice system. One Australian study, that by Marjoribanks and Jordan (1986), found that Anglo-Australians categorized Aboriginal people by a general stereotype that was defined by 11 attributes including untrustworthiness, aggression, and often being in trouble with the police. The social construction of Indigenous people as lawless or criminal has also received some attention from legal commentators (e.g., Bird, 1987; O'Shane, 1992). These investigations, however, have focused on a perceived ethnocentric bias in the legal system that discriminates against Indigenous people rather than an empirical assessment of the issue.
In light of these findings it would seem that the empirical investigation of community attitudes to Indigenous people's participation in the criminal justice system is an under-researched area that has the potential to make a valuable and timely contribution to both social psychological understandings of prejudice against Indigenous Australians and the ramifications of this prejudice for the criminal justice system.
Exploring Reactions to Offenders and Offences: Judgements of Responsibility and Severity of Sentence
One way to approach this topic is through an examination of those factors that are believed to moderate the judgements that members of the community make in response to outcomes of the criminal justice process. Previously, researchers interested in gauging community responses to offenders have used two judgements: the offender's perceived responsibility for an offence and the perceived severity of an assigned sentence (e.g., Feather & Oberdan, 2000; Feather & Souter, 2002).
According to Weiner (1995), responsibility is an affectively neutral judgement by which a person is held accountable for an act or event and its consequences. Weiner cautions against equating judgements of responsibility with perceived causal controllability, which is an attribution variable. The distinction is that an attribution is an assessment of the causes of an act while a judgement is an assessment of an actor. Mantler, Schellenberg, and Stewart Page (2003) explored distinctions between controllability, responsibility and blame in response to people with a serious illness; producing results that supported this distinction. They found that ratings of controllability were higher than ratings of responsibility, which, in turn, were higher than blame ratings. In addition, when used to predict behaviours towards a seriously ill person, the variables in question accounted for different proportions of the variance, thus suggesting that they were understood by participants as being distinct.
The second variable, severity of sentence, is a judgement of the appropriateness of a sentence imposed on an offender for the offence they have committed. Feather (1996) found that three variables, namely perceived responsibility, seriousness of the crime, and the extent to which an offender is perceived to deserve the penalty imposed, influence judgements of sentence severity. Type of offence has also been shown to influence this judgement, with offences committed against a person (e.g., violent offences) resulting in an offender being seen more negatively and with a subsequent preference for more punitive sentencing options (e.g., Sanderson, Zanna, & Darley, 2000). The possibility that an offender's ethnicity may also influence this judgement was explored in a later article (Feather & Sourer, 2002). In that study the ethnicity of offender did not affect the severity of sentence imposed by participants. More extensive testing of this possibility in a different location, time period, and using a community sample in place of a student sample is important, not least because establishing the effect of an offender's ethnicity on sentence severity judgements is an important step towards understanding community attitudes towards Indigenous offenders. A perception that a sentence imposed on an Indigenous offender is more lenient than the same sentence imposed for the same offence on an Anglo-Australian offender would suggest that community members endorse dealing with them more punitively than with Anglo-Australian offenders. This stance discounts the social and economic factors that Indigenous people endure and which have been related to higher instances of some offences (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision [SCRGSP], 2005).
Factors Affecting Judgement-Making: Attribution Theory
Initially proposed by Heider (1958), attribution theory provides a useful model for exploring how particular judgements are made. It attempts to explain how individuals make decisions about the cause of an action or event. It was based on the observation that these causal factors were assessed with reference to the observer's inferences regarding the locus of control of an action--in other words, whether the cause of an action is thought to stem from factors within the actor or from environmental factors external to the actor. Weiner has expanded on this base to include two further variables: controllability, which, as indicated above, refers to the extent to which an actor is seen to be in control of causal factors; and stability, which refers to the constancy or level of fluctuation that a factor is believed to have (Weiner, 1985). Furthermore, a number of researchers suggest that attributions may provide information for an observer to make decisions regarding an actor's responsibility for an event.
Attributions of Controllability and Judgement-Making. Attributions for controllability (i.e., a tendency to see the actor in control of causal factors) have consistently been linked to actors being judged more responsible for the act and its consequences (Rudolph, Roesch, Greitemeyer, & Weiner, 2004; Weiner, 1995). This is a robust phenomenon that can be observed in diverse social settings from decision-making regarding...
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