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Can Incarcerated Felons Be (Re)integrated into the Political System? Results from a Field Experiment
Funding for this research was provided by Yale University and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. We thank Vesla Weaver; Seth Hill; Matt Levendusky; seminar participants at UCLA, UCSD, the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Studies, and Yale University; the anonymous reviewers; and the editor for their helpful comments and feedback. We also thank the Connecticut Secretary of State's office for their cooperation. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2012 American Political Science Association meeting and circulated with the title “Felony Status, Patterns of Participation, and the Possibility of Political Reintegration: Results from a Field Experiment.” Data and supporting materials are available at http://huber.research.yale.edu and the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps). All errors are our own.
Abstract
How does America's high rate of incarceration shape political participation? Few studies have examined the direct effects of incarceration on patterns of political engagement. Answering this question is particularly relevant for the 93% of formerly incarcerated individuals who are eligible to vote. Drawing on new administrative data from Connecticut, we present evidence from a field experiment showing that a simple informational outreach campaign to released felons can recover a large proportion of the reduction in participation observed following incarceration. The treatment effect estimates imply that efforts to reintegrate released felons into the political process can substantially reduce the participatory consequences of incarceration.