Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility

Christopher D. Berk, Lucas Núñez, and Brett Burkhardt. “Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility.” Working paper.

Status: Working paper — pre-registered (OSF; registration currently under embargo)

Preprint: SSRN / SocArXiv / APSA Preprints

Overview

This article provides the first direct experimental test of “less eligibility”—the centuries-old idea, first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, that no one subject to punishment should be better off than the poorest free person. Using a pre-registered conjoint survey experiment with nearly 2,000 U.S. adults, the study finds that Americans are significantly less willing to support the same government program (a year of free college courses and job counseling) for an incarcerated applicant than for a poor applicant who has never been incarcerated—a 7.7 percentage-point “incarceration penalty.”

That penalty barely narrows even when the incarcerated applicant is shown to benefit three times as much from the program as the comparison case, and it widens, counterintuitively, when the incarcerated applicant is described as hard-working. The findings suggest that resistance to prison programming is less a matter of missing information than a durable moral judgment about who counts as deserving.

Central Question

Does incarceration status shape public support for social programs independent of poverty, and can that penalty be moved?

Contribution

This article intervenes in debates in:

• welfare politics and deservingness
• public opinion and punishment
• mass incarceration and reentry policy
• moral psychology of punishment
• experimental methods (conjoint analysis)

It shows that the “incarceration penalty” operates as a moral rather than an instrumental judgment: cost-benefit evidence can narrow it, but not dislodge it.

Who might find this useful?

Scholars working on:

• welfare politics and social policy attitudes
• deservingness heuristics
• punitive attitudes and criminal justice reform
• conjoint survey experiments
• prison programming and reentry
• the moral psychology of punishment

Related work by the author

Readers interested in this argument may also want to see:

• Must Penal Law Be Insulated from Public Influence?
• Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, Patients, and the Limits of Self-Government
• The Submerged Prison State: Punishment, Private Interests, and the Politics of Public Accountability

Suggested citation

Berk, Christopher D., Lucas Núñez, and Brett Burkhardt. 2026. “Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility.” Working paper.

@unpublished{berknunezburkhardt:2026,
  title={Incarceration and deservingness: Experimental evidence on less eligibility},
  author={Berk, Christopher D and N{\'u}{\~n}ez, Lucas and Burkhardt, Brett},
  note={Working paper},
  year={2026}
}