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.

Last month the IRB at Mason approved my follow-up study. Over the month of November I’ll be in the field interviewing current staff and former students of a boarding school, collecting records at the institution, and photographing documents in nearby archives. I’m absolutely thrilled to be diving headfirst into this project!

My article “The Submerged Prison State: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability” has been accepted for publication at Punishment and Society. [Online first copy available here.]

Here’s the abstract:

Much of the US penal state is ‘submerged,’ in the sense that Suzanne Mettler uses the term. There are networks of rules and regulations that link public funds, services, and institutions to various private interests with far reaching consequences. These networks are largely a stealth presence in the lives of citizens and their subterranean status, I argue, warps the wider politics of punishment. Resources are circulated along this network in such a way revenue is generated for some, costs cut for others, all in the shadow of public law. To the extent that this kind of redistribution lacks citizens’ consent and approval, it also represents a potentially undemocratic development. Here, I show how the obscured visibility of these public-private connections distorts public attitudes about, and public support for, the penal state. The final pages draw out the normative implications of that distortion.

Keywords:

access to justice, civil law, tax expenditures, carceral state, privatization, regulation, politics of punishment, democratic theory

Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, patients, and the limits of self-government is now available for pre-order (link here) and is scheduled to be released this August.

A drop of good news in an ocean of bad: my article titled “Must penal law be insulated from public influence?” has been accepted at Law and Philosophy. [Accessible here.]