"Conditions of Confinement: Do Harsher Carceral Environments Reduce Political Participation?"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper available via SSRN authored by Jacob Harris.  Here is its abstract:

How does the severity of incarceration-not just its occurrence-affect formal political participation?  I address this question with two natural experiments in Pennsylvania prisons and jails.  In Study 1, I leverage exogenous variation in the custody levels individuals are assigned to in Pennsylvania prisons based on sharp cutoffs in their custody classification scores.  In Study 2, I use booking and release data from eight Pennsylvania county jails to study the effect of being incarcerated during extreme heat without access to air conditioning.  I estimate precise null effects in Study 1 but show in Study 2 that incarceration during extreme heat causes substantial reductions in turnout and registration.  Contrary to past work, these demobilizing effects are concentrated among white individuals.  These results provide the first causal evidence of the "interpretive" policy feedback mechanism following punitive interactions and demonstrate the need for more research into how heterogeneity in citizen-state interactions differentially affects political outcomes.