Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility

Christopher Berk, Lucas Nunez and Brett C Burkhardt
Additional contact information
Brett C Burkhardt: Oregon State University

No 3dn9y_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: A substantial literature on welfare politics shows that public support for redistribution depends on markers like need, effort, and reciprocity that sort recipients into deserving and undeserving categories. We test whether incarceration status functions as a particularly powerful deservingness marker, structured by the eighteenth-century principle of "less eligibility": that no one subject to punishment should fare better than the poorest free person. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment with a representative U.S. sample (N = 1,929), we find that incarcerated applicants to an identical rehabilitative program receive substantially less public support than otherwise-comparable poor or welfare-dependent applicants — a penalty that persists even when the incarcerated applicant is shown to benefit more from the program than the comparison case. Decomposing the moral-cultural mechanisms behind this penalty, we find community-belonging and cost-benefit evidence each narrow it somewhat, while signals of the applicant's hard work and reliability paradoxically widen it. The incarceration penalty, we argue, operates as a durable boundary of moral exclusion rather than a correctable informational gap, with implications for how welfare-state and punishment scholarship jointly understand deservingness.

Date: 2026-08-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6a8db917de267f189c8e05b6/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:3dn9y_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/3dn9y_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().