Attitudes toward incarceration, neuronormalization and psychological treatment for violent offenders

Incarceration is a popular method of dealing with violent offenders. However, incarceration does not rehabilitate many violent offenders and often increases recidivism, which suggests a need for different interventions. Because public opinion has an important influence on the criminal justice system, we compared attitudes toward two alternative interventions and incarceration. These alternative interventions were brain-based treatments (i.e. neuronormalization) and psychological therapies. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to one of these three interventions and answered questions about their use with violent offenders in general and two severely violent cases: a domestic violence homicide offender and a child sex offender. For violent offenders in general, participants were more positive toward neuronormalization and psychological therapies than incarceration. However, when evaluating the two severely violent cases, participants were most positive toward incarceration. These findings highlight that people were generally amenable to alternative treatments for violent offenders, but these attitudes flipped in favor of incarceration when confronted with serious individual cases of violence. Our findings suggest that disseminating evidence for the effectiveness of alternative treatments may eventually lead to positive attitudes and policy change. Doing so could simultaneously lead to lower rates of incarceration and recidivism and create safer communities.