Changing the Public's Crime Control Theater Attitudes

Crime control theater (CCT) are criminal justice policies and laws that are widely favored by the public but are demonstrated empirical failures. Across two experiments, this research examines video interventions designed to change the public's views toward two sexual offender CCT laws-sex offender housing restrictions and sex offender registry laws. In Experiment 1 (N = 217), both factual and narrative-based interventions were successful in lowering participants' ratings of support but not effectiveness for these policies. However, whereas participants viewed the narrative-based videos as more engaging, coherent, and emotional, these differences did not translate into more significant attitude transformations or learning of the unintended consequences of these policies. In Experiment 2 (N = 133), these findings were largely replicated, and, importantly, the decrease in participants' support for these policies after the intervention was maintained a week later, with smaller decreases in participants' ratings of effectiveness evident. Yet, the exact mechanism of these attitudinal changes remains unclear but appears unrelated to their memory for or engagement with the interventions. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.