Do Incarceration and Release Change How People Treat Those With a Criminal History? Longitudinal Behavioural and Neural Evidence.

Social decision-making is central to successful reintegration following incarceration, yet whether imprisonment changes how people treat individuals with versus without a criminal history remains unclear. In this preregistered longitudinal study, newly detained (incoming, n = 34) and newly released (outgoing, n = 13) individuals completed a social decision task with EEG at three sessions over eight months, choosing whether to direct prosocial or antisocial actions toward characters described as having an incarceration history (here termed incarceration-history targets) or not (community targets). Frontal midline theta (FMθ) was recorded as an index of choice-related conflict. Prison-climate and quality-of-life measures were also collected. Across groups, participants identified more strongly with (formerly) incarcerated individuals, yet directed more antisocial intentions toward incarceration-history targets and more prosocial intentions toward community targets. Incoming participants showed a reduction in prosocial community intentions after four months that rebounded by eight months. Incoming participants showed higher FMθ than outgoing participants early in incarceration, with a progressive reduction over time in all groups, consistent with reduced decision conflict. Exploratory analyses linked social intentions to prison-environment and well-being factors. Because the target types differed in criminal history and, inevitably, in how positively they were described, these effects are best understood as responses to stigma linked with incarceration-history rather than to group membership. These findings suggest that incarceration and release involve distinct adaptations in social decision-making toward (ex-)prisoners, with dissociable behavioural and neural markers.