Combating the Terrorist Stigma: Communicating Rehabilitation and Reducing Barriers to Reintegration

Abstract

Stigmatizing behavior and a lack of supportive behavior can act as a barrier to successfully reintegrating terrorist offenders, potentially resulting in reoffending. As such, there have been several efforts to understand how to build community support for reintegration of terrorist offenders, for example through community engagement or messaging from trusted authorities. Research on the drivers of community support for reintegrating criminal offenders further suggests the perceived redeemability of an offender is significant at overcoming stigmatization and promoting support for rehabilitation and re-entry into society. In this study, we deploy an experimental survey design to isolate the causal effect of information which signals offender redeemability and then analyze its effect on four measures of supportive and stigmatizing behavior toward a terrorist offender. We also examine the individual characteristics of those more or less likely to report supportive or stigmatizing behaviors toward the reintegrating offender. The findings show that signaling redeemability decreases one measure of stigmatizing behavior and increases one measure of supportive behavior. While trusted messengers may be important in building community support for reintegration, our findings demonstrate the salience of communicating that an offender has completed a rehabilitation program, even among audiences typically opposed to reintegration.