Is a conservative just a liberal who has been mugged?

As in the adage that `a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged', many presume that punitive public attitudes are derived from the direct experience of crime and victimization. People become `fed up' with criminality and seek to strike back at lawbreakers. Social theories of punitiveness, on the other hand, typically portray punitiveness as a form of scape-goating in which offenders are just a stand-in population, masking more abstract anxieties. This survey was designed to explore both of these hypotheses with a sample ( N = 940) of the British public. A multivariate analysis of survey responses finds that factors such as concerns about the economy and the state of `the youth today' account for a substantial proportion of the effect of actual crime concerns on punitiveness. Crime-related factors, such as victimization experiences or anxieties about crime, on the other hand, do not appear to be strong predictors of punitiveness in this sample.