Standing in Prisoners’ Shoes: A Randomized Trial on How Incarceration Shapes Criminal Justice Preferences

We study how incarceration experience shapes preferences for criminal justice policies. In collaboration with a newly opened prison, we conducted a randomized field experiment that offered citizens the opportunity to experience up to two days of incarceration, closely replicating the real-life journey of inmates. Providing citizens with a chance to gain firsthand incarceration leads to a significant shift in punitive attitudes, with participants becoming less supportive of harsh criminal justice policies and donating more money to organizations advocating more moderate justice policies. Although individuals overestimated the wellbeing of actual prisoners, the intervention did not alter these beliefs or broader views of the justice system. This suggests that the observed changes in policy preferences are driven more by lived experience than by revised beliefs about the burden of confinement or institutional functioning. By randomizing institutional exposure outside the laboratory, our study highlights the causal role of personal experience in the formation of policy preferences.