Incarceration and Deservingness: Experimental Evidence on Less Eligibility

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.