Conditions of Confinement: Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Political Participation?

Abstract

How does the severity of incarceration — not just its occurrence — affect political participation? Past research has examined how interactions with criminal justice institutions feedback into the political marginalization of justice-involved individuals. However, this work, like most other policy feedback research, dichotomizes interactions with the state, overlooking important variation in these interactions. Leveraging discontinuities in the Pennsylvania Department of Correction’s custody level classification process as a (pre-registered) natural experiment, I study the effect of incarceration severity on post-release registration and turnout. I find qualified evidence of a demobilizing effect on voting and registration in some, but not all, elections. I do not observe significant effects by race, but these tests are less precise. The small, inconsistent effects of incarceration severity align with past work which has found small to negligible effects of imprisonment on turnout. Understanding heterogeneity in citizen-state interactions remains an important step for future research.

Keywords: turnout, prison, jail, policy feedback, regression discontinuity