I have a new working paper out, with Lucas Núñez (George Mason) and Brett Burkhardt (Oregon State): Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility.
The paper pairs old political theory with new experimental data: we take Bentham’s centuries-old principle of “less eligibility” — that no one subject to punishment should be better off than the poorest free person — and test it directly with a pre-registered survey experiment on nearly 2,000 U.S. adults. We find that Americans are significantly less willing to support the very same government program (a year of free college courses and job counseling) for an incarcerated applicant than for an equally poor applicant who’s never been incarcerated. That penalty barely budges even when the incarcerated applicant is shown to benefit more from the program, and it actually widens when he’s described as hard-working. The takeaway: resistance to prison programming looks less like a gap in information than a durable moral judgment about who counts as deserving, rooted in an idea political theorists have been arguing about since the eighteenth century.
I’ve posted the pre-print to SSRN.
