Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility

Does incarceration status shape public support for government programs independent of poverty or welfare receipt? We test this question with a pre-registered conjoint experiment (N = 1,929; 11,547 profile evaluations) that randomly assigns a hypothetical applicant's social position — poverty, welfare, or incarcerated — alongside offense severity, effort, community ties, program design, and cost-benefit information. Incarcerated applicants receive less support for an identical government program than free-poor applicants (a 7.7-point "incarceration penalty") or welfare recipients (4.9 points), a gap that grows with respondent punitiveness and conservative ideology but is untouched by respondents' own incarceration or crime-victimization experience. The penalty narrows by roughly half when applicants are shown to benefit disproportionately from the program, yet never closes, and widens when incarcerated applicants are described as hard-working. We interpret these results as evidence that incarceration operates as a moral, not merely informational, boundary in the American public's calculus of deservingness.