LSU Survey finds support for short sentences for non-violent offenders

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Half of Louisiana’s overall adult residents believes the state’s criminal justice system is fair, but seven in 10 black respondents say it unfair, according to The Louisiana Survey released Tuesday.
Two-thirds of those polled believe crime incidents have increased 10 percentage points in the last year, up from 55 percent in 2015.
The survey of 1,012 residents between Feb. 23 and March 23 by LSU’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs showed 86 percent of the respondents favored finding alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders. That included 75 percent who supported shorter sentences for non-violent offenders with 72 percent favored increasing a judge’s sentencing flexibility. There was little disparity between the white and black responses in this area.
The release of the results coincides with Gov. John Bel Edwards’s recently announced criminal justice reform legislative agenda, which is based on recommendations from the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.
The feeling that crime has risen in the last year is more common among black than white respondents and among those without a four-year college degree, according to the report.
Though there was little division in perception between Democrats and Republicans in general, the survey did find that 66 percent of white Republicans perceived an increase compared to 48 percent of white Democrats.
Because two of the proposed reforms targeted non-violent violent crimes, the survey explored people’s perceptions of what is considered a non-violent crime by randomly assigning them one of three versions of the question about shorter sentencing.
The first version did not specify an example of a non-violent crime, the second version offered fraud and illegal drugs as examples and the third version offered burglary and selling illegal drugs as examples. But even there, a majority of those surveyed opted for lighter sentences.
The support, however, dropped 21 percentage points from the first to the third sets of examples.
The criminal justice reform survey is part of a series of six reports being released this year by the Reilly Center’s Public Policy Research Lab.