Year of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Department or School/College

Sociology and Criminology

Committee Chair

Andrew Thompson

Committee Co-chair

Mark Heirigs

Commitee Members

Madison Gerdes, Anya Jabour

Keywords

Sex Offender Registries, Public Attitudes, Punitiveness, Racial Threat, White Nationalism, Retributive Impulses

Subject Categories

Criminology | Race and Ethnicity | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance | Sociology

Abstract

Sex offender registries represent one of the most expansive and punitive criminal justice interventions in modern American history, yet public support for these policies remainsunderi nvestigated. Scholarly debate has questioned whether punitive attitudes toward sexual offenders reflect principled moral judgments, racial threat perceptions, or both. This study addresses that question by examining how offender race, offender age, offense severity, victim age, and offender-victim relationship shape public attitudes toward sexual offenders in the contemporary registry era. Drawing on theories of racialized sexual threat, group position, and retributive impulses, the study uses a nationally representative conjoint survey experiment administered through YouGov (N = 1,350). Respondents evaluated hypothetical sexual offender profiles varying by offender race and age, offense type, victim age, relationship to the victim, and adjudication status across four outcome domains: support for the death penalty, sentence severity, perceived rehabilitative potential, and social distance.

Findings indicate that public attitudes toward sexual offenders are shaped more consistently by retributive moral judgments than by explicit racial differentiation. Offenses involving physical force and younger victims produced the harshest punishments, lowest perceptions of rehabilitative potential, and strongest support for social exclusion across outcomes, underscoring the central role of victim vulnerability and offense severity in structuring punitive attitudes. Respondents also expressed broadly punitive attitudes toward sexual offenders generally, particularly for the most severe offenses. Although some evidence of racial leniency emerged, racial effects were weaker and less consistent than expected. Likewise, offender age and offender-victim relationship exerted comparatively limited influence across outcomes. Supplementary analyses further demonstrated that white nationalism intensified punitive evaluations overall. Together, the findings suggest that contemporary attitudes toward sexual offenders are driven less by overt racial hostility than by broader moral frameworks centered on symbolic danger, victim vulnerability, and retributive punishment. These findings point toward a broader discussion of how racial logic becomes embedded in the architecture of sexual offense policy—not through overt animus, but through the differential application of moral categories of danger, deviance, and rehabilitative worthiness that have historically tracked race.

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© Copyright 2026 Edith Meade