Crime victims support tough, long sentences

The claim

Proponents of tough sentencing argue that long prison terms and aggressive prosecution are what crime victims actually want and need. In this framing, calls for sentencing reform, rehabilitation, and alternatives to incarceration represent a misplaced sympathy for offenders at the expense of those they harmed. Organizations like Crime Victims of America and many district attorneys running for office argue that reducing sentences is a betrayal of survivors. The implicit assumption is that victims uniformly favor maximum punishment, that retributive justice is the primary vehicle for healing, and that criminal justice reformers have abandoned them in favor of ideology.

The mechanism

The claim rests on a retributive justice model: the offender inflicted harm, the victim therefore wants the offender to suffer an equivalent deprivation, and the state’s role is to satisfy that demand through incarceration. Longer sentences, on this view, express greater social acknowledgment of the harm done and give survivors closure through the knowledge that the person who harmed them is removed from society for an extended period.

The mechanism has genuine intuitive force for some categories of victims. Survivors of severe violence, survivors of crimes committed by strangers, and survivors who fear repeat victimization may rationally prefer incapacitation. The mechanism is weakest, however, when the offender is known to the victim — as is the case in the majority of violent crimes — and when the victim and offender share a community. In those circumstances, a long sentence may remove a family member or neighbor, devastate households financially, and leave the victim without restitution, without answers, and without changed behavior from the person who harmed them. The claim also conflates retributive satisfaction (which some victims want) with the full range of needs survivors identify — safety, financial recovery, acknowledgment, and prevention of future harm to others.

The evidence

What crime survivors say when asked directly

The most direct challenge to the claim comes from survey research conducted with crime survivors themselves. The Alliance for Safety and Justice, which runs the Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice network, has conducted two major national surveys of crime victims (2016 and 2019). In the 2016 survey of over 800 crime survivors, 61% preferred shorter sentences combined with rehabilitation, job training, and mental health treatment over longer sentences; 28% preferred longer sentences. This 2:1 margin was consistent across age, race, and offense type. In the 2019 follow-up, 70% prioritized prevention investment over prosecution and incarceration. Importantly, these surveys oversampled victims of violent crime — they were not dominated by minor property crime survivors with little stake in the question.

These results are not outliers. A 2020 national survey by the Justice Lab at Columbia University found that crime survivors ranked restitution, mental health services, and community accountability programs as higher priorities than prison sentences when asked to allocate a hypothetical justice budget. Respondents who had experienced repeat victimization were among the most likely to favor prevention-oriented responses, consistent with the view that survivors in high-crime communities understand that incarceration cycles do not interrupt patterns of harm.

Restorative justice and victim satisfaction

The most rigorous experimental evidence on victim satisfaction comes from the Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE) conducted in Canberra, Australia during the 1990s and early 2000s, analyzed by Lawrence Sherman and Heather Strang. RISE randomly assigned cases — including violent offenses and property crimes — to either conventional court processing or facilitated restorative conferences in which the offender met the victim and community members. Victim satisfaction rates in the restorative track ranged from 79 to 90%, compared with approximately 40% in conventional court, with the gap largest in violent offense categories. Victims in the restorative track were significantly more likely to report that they felt the process was fair, that they were treated with respect, and that they did not want to harm the offender in return — a measure of emotional recovery that purely punitive processing did not achieve.

Similar results have been replicated in the UK (Ministry of Justice randomized trials, 2008–2011), in Canadian indigenous community courts, and in New Zealand’s family group conferencing model. In New Zealand, which made restorative conferencing a statutory component of youth justice in 1989, victim participation rates exceed 80% and victim satisfaction scores consistently outperform conventional prosecution benchmarks.

The victim-offender overlap

A structural feature of victimization that the claim consistently ignores is that victims and offenders in high-crime communities are often the same people at different moments. Research by Piquero, MacDonald, Dobrin, Daigle, and Cullen (2005) using longitudinal survey data found that approximately 38% of violent crime victims in their sample had prior criminal justice involvement. In urban, high-poverty areas, this overlap is even more pronounced. This means that policies designed to maximize sentences for offenders are, in statistical expectation, also maximizing sentences for people who are themselves crime victims. The Community Justice Exchange and the Prison Policy Initiative have both documented that the communities most affected by violent crime — predominantly low-income Black and Latino urban communities — are also the communities most harmed by mass incarceration through lost wages, destabilized households, and reduced collective efficacy.

Underreporting and institutional distrust

The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, via the National Crime Victimization Survey, that only 42% of violent crimes were reported to police in 2022. Underreporting rates are highest in communities of color and among domestic violence survivors. If victims universally wanted punitive enforcement, one would expect higher reporting rates. Research on underreporting consistently finds that victims avoid police contact because they fear the consequences of involvement in the criminal justice system for themselves or community members, do not believe the system will help them, or want alternative forms of resolution. This is not evidence that victims oppose incarceration in every case, but it is inconsistent with the claim that punitive enforcement is the universal preference.

International victim compensation and support models

Germany, Norway, Canada, and the UK have all invested substantially in victim compensation funds, trauma-informed services, and restorative diversion alongside criminal prosecution. German criminal procedure allows victims to join as co-plaintiffs (Nebenklage), giving them direct participation rights and access to restitution without requiring maximum incarceration of offenders. Norway’s victim service framework provides direct financial compensation, counseling, and case advocates independent of sentence length. Victim satisfaction surveys in these jurisdictions do not show lower satisfaction than in the US, despite substantially shorter sentences — suggesting that procedural fairness, participation, and material support matter more to many survivors than the length of the sentence imposed.

Who benefits

The claim that victims universally want maximum sentences serves identifiable institutional interests. Prosecutors seeking election or higher office have long deployed victim impact rhetoric to signal toughness; the Marsy’s Law movement — funded in significant part by billionaire Henry Nicholas — has expanded crime victim constitutional rights in ways that embed punitive preferences into state constitutions, reducing judicial discretion in ways that benefit prosecutors. Victims-rights organizations with close institutional ties to law enforcement — Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the National Organization for Victim Assistance in certain configurations — have historically aligned with prosecutorial associations that oppose sentencing reform. The private prison industry, primarily GEO Group and CoreCivic, lobbies through the American Legislative Exchange Council for truth-in-sentencing and mandatory minimum legislation; invoking victim sentiment is a useful rhetorical instrument in those campaigns. District attorneys who rely on mandatory minimum charging as plea leverage have a structural interest in maintaining the public perception that victims demand maximum punishment.

The counter

The claim is not simply false. A meaningful subset of crime victims do want long sentences, and that preference deserves respect as a legitimate expression of retributive justice rather than being dismissed as unsophisticated or manipulated. Survivors of homicide, rape, and severe violence who support aggressive prosecution are not acting against their interests; their preferences reflect genuine and coherent values about proportionality and societal denunciation of harm. Victim heterogeneity cuts both ways: just as it undermines the claim that all victims want maximum sentences, it also refutes the counter-claim that all victims prefer rehabilitation.

The restorative justice satisfaction literature also has limits. RISE and similar experiments typically involve offenses below the most severe violence categories; it is not established that restorative conferencing produces comparable satisfaction in homicide, mass violence, or sexual trafficking cases. Some survivors have critiqued restorative justice as placing an unfair burden on victims to engage with their offenders, and as producing symbolic accountability without meaningful consequences for serious harms. Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, which promotes prevention-oriented approaches, represents a portion of the survivor population — it is an advocacy organization, not a representative sample, and its framing likely attracts members predisposed toward its conclusions.

The evidence is therefore genuinely contested at the distributional level. What is not supported is the strong version of the claim — that victims uniformly prefer long sentences, that reformers are speaking against victims, or that restorative and rehabilitative approaches fail survivors. The aggregated evidence suggests that a majority of crime survivors, particularly those in high-crime communities with chronic exposure to the justice system, hold preferences more aligned with reform than with the punitive consensus that claims to speak for them.

References

Alliance for Safety and Justice. (2016). Crime survivors speak: The first-ever national survey of victims’ views on safety and justice. Alliance for Safety and Justice.

Alliance for Safety and Justice. (2019). Crime survivors speak 2.0: A national survey of victims’ views on safety and justice. Alliance for Safety and Justice.

Sherman, L. W., & Strang, H. (2007). Restorative justice: The evidence. Smith Institute.

Strang, H., Barnes, G., Braithwaite, J., & Sherman, L. W. (1999). Experiments in restorative policing: A progress report on the Canberra Reintegrative Shaming Experiments. Australian National University.

Ministry of Justice. (2011). Restorative justice: The evidence base. UK Ministry of Justice.

Piquero, A. R., MacDonald, J., Dobrin, A., Daigle, L. E., & Cullen, F. T. (2005). Self-control, violent offending, and homicide victimization: Assessing the general theory of crime. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 21(1), 55–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-004-1787-2

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2023). Criminal victimization, 2022 (NCJ 307089). US Department of Justice.

Umbreit, M. S., Coates, R. B., & Vos, B. (2004). Victim-offender mediation: Three decades of practice and research. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 22(1–2), 279–303. https://doi.org/10.1002/crq.100

Daly, K. (2006). The limits of restorative justice. In D. Sullivan & L. Tifft (Eds.), Handbook of restorative justice: A global perspective (pp. 134–145). Routledge.

Travis, J., Western, B., & Redburn, S. (Eds.). (2014). The growth of incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and consequences. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18613