The Public Sense of Criminal Justice

The project aims to provide new knowledge on different aspects of the public sense of criminal justice in the Norwegian population. The analyses will be based on a representative vignette survey, the Ungdata surveys, and focus group interviews.

The project aims to provide new knowledge on different aspects of the public sense of criminal justice in the Norwegian population. This includes the general sense of justice, which includes the population's overall attitudes to and feelings about criminal justice and sanctioning, the informed sense of justice, which includes assessments of sanctioning in particular criminal cases, and the concrete sense of justice, which covers reasoning done on sanctioning in these cases.

The project will analyze the public sense of justice for four different types of crimes:

1. sexual offences
2. drug offences
3. hate speech
4. violent offences

Key issues to be studied in the project are knowledge and attitudes in the population on sanction levels for different criminal acts, as well as possible discrepancies between the public sense of criminal justice and actual court sentencing.

The study will also shed light on how people reason on the boundaries between legal and criminal acts.

Data

The main data material in the project are telephone interviews and a vignette-based survey to a representative sample of the Norwegian population, as well as a focus group interviews among adolescents and young adults discussing the same vignettes.

Concrete sentencing levels in Norway will be studied using a panel of court judges. Finally, we will study the general sense of justice among students in junior and senior high school using the Ungdata surveys.