Reconsidering the Relationship between Incarceration, Trust in the State, Community Engagement, and Civic Participation

Scholars have reached different conclusions about the relationship between carceral contact and community engagement and civic participation. We offer a theoretical account that aims to synthesize this work to argue that incarceration should depress trust in the state but may increase, decrease, or produce no substantial effect on community or civic engagement, leading to no overall average association. We use data from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS), a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States (n = 2,703) to conduct an expansive test of associations between direct (own) and indirect (family member) incarceration and trust in the state, civic participation, and community engagement. Our findings show that incarceration may not uniformly depress political and civic behaviors, on average. Furthermore, they inform our understanding of seemingly divergent conclusions in prior research, underscoring potential variability of prosocial actions and their enabling and constraining conditions in the wake of carceral contact.