Education and the Interface between Racial Perceptions and Criminal Justice Attitudes

Recent work has implicated negative attitudes toward blacks in support for toughened criminal‐justice measures. This suggests that the issue of crime may be implicitly “racialized,” despite a lack of overt racial content. The present study examines the hypothesis that education may weaken the relationship between negative racial perceptions and crime‐related policy attitudes. In contrast to traditional views about the role of education in the domain of race‐related attitudes, the results of analyses using several different general‐population samples suggest that the effects of education are somewhat paradoxical: they reduce the intensity of negative racial perceptions, while bolstering the relationship between these perceptions and criminal justice attitudes.