Examine whether exposure to traumatic brain injury (TBI) information influences public willingness to fund neuroscience-informed correctional practices and identify individual characteristics associated with funding support. Using a national survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, respondents were randomly assigned to receive TBI information incorporating text and brain images or no information. Analyses examined hypothetical willingness to pay additional taxes and associations with humanizing and empathetic beliefs toward incarcerated individuals, racial resentment, political ideology, and other characteristics. Exposure to TBI information did not significantly influence willingness to pay. Humanizing beliefs toward incarcerated individuals were positively associated with funding support, whereas racial resentment was negatively associated with support. Informational interventions alone may be insufficient to increase public support for neuroscience-informed correctional practices. Broader attitudes toward incarcerated individuals may be more consequential. Findings are limited by the hypothetical funding measure and the combined informational treatment, which precludes isolating the effects of text and imagery.
The intertwining of the criminal legal system with immigration enforcement has shifted under President Donald Trump. The revoking of naturalized citizenship for criminal offending has increased and birthright citizenship has been attacked via executive order. A punitive “crimmigration” process where the criminal legal system is used not just to identify immigrants, but to revoke citizenship and open the door to immigration enforcement (deportation) may be on the horizon. Do Americans support revoking naturalized or birthright citizenship? Does it depend on the targeted citizens’ criminal behavior? We embedded an experiment in a 2025 YouGov survey (N = 1,000) to examine public opinion on revoking citizenship. The experiment randomized the targeted citizens’ citizenship type (naturalized or birthright) and crime type (none, traffic, nonviolent, or violent). Most respondents (64
We assessed how the Dallas County District Attorney’s 2019 cannabis deprosecution policy related to two dimensions of police productivity: cannabis arrests and emergency response times. We used interrupted time series analysis with within-jurisdiction comparison series, modeling the 2020 pandemic as a separate interruption. Monthly cannabis arrests were compared with assault arrests, and priority-one response times with priority-two. Cannabis arrests fell sharply, but the decline was concentrated in 2021 and coincided with a departmental cite-and-release order, not the 2019 de-prosecution policy. After accounting for the pandemic, we found no evidence that officers shifted enforcement toward serious crime. Priority-one response times improved significantly relative to priority-two, though by more than the policy could plausibly produce, so we report this as an association, not a causal effect. Operational changes in this period are easily misattributed to a single policy when concurrent events go unmodeled. Claims that de-prosecution improves police productivity require designs capable of separating these influences.
This study examines whether Fort Wayne, Indiana’s High Street Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) project that combined pedestrian scale streetlighting, murals, sidewalk improvements, and neighborhood activation was associated with reductions in monthly reported crime, and whether any reduction reflected displacement or diffusion of benefits to nearby areas. Using street-segment-level crime data for Fort Wayne (2010–2023), we estimate difference-in-differences Poisson regression models comparing monthly crime counts on High Street segments before and after implementation to comparison segments at varying buffer distances, including an entropy-balanced control group constructed to have similar pre-intervention crime trends. The High Street CPTED project was associated with a 45.2
To examine how adults evaluate different forms of misogynistic meme content and whether rape myth acceptance, social dominance and personal cultural orientations predict these evaluations. Five hundred and eighty adults were randomly assigned to view memes depicting sexual violence, domestic violence, or sexist/objectifying content. Participants rated humour, offensiveness, acceptability, resharing likelihood, and perceived commonness. Measures of rape myth acceptance (RMA), social dominance orientation, and personal cultural orientation were also assessed. Sexist/objectifying memes were rated as more humorous, acceptable, likely to be reshared and common than both violence categories, whereas offensiveness followed the ordering sexual violence, domestic violence and sexualised content. Rape myth acceptance moderated humour ratings across the exploratory interaction tests: the positive association between rape myth acceptance and humour was substantially steeper for sexualised content. Moderation of acceptability and resharing was less robust. Rape-supportive beliefs play a central role in how misogynistic content is interpreted, evaluated, and potentially disseminated online. Participants distinguished clearly between forms of misogynistic content. The most reliable moderation finding indicated greater differentiation in humour ratings at higher rape myth acceptance.
