Food Stamps for Felons? An Analysis of the Impact of Public Assistance Policy on Offender Recidivism Rates

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Last Modified
  • May 15, 2019
Creator
  • Young, Caitlin
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
Abstract
  • Criminal justice reform is increasingly becoming a hot-button issue in public opinion discourse in the United States. This new wave of reforms is a response to decades of punitive policies that led to massive increases in US incarceration rates. In this thesis, I address one such policy: the lifetime ban on access to welfare benefits (TANF) and food stamps (SNAP) for drug felons after release from prison, passed as part of the welfare reforms of 1996. I collected data from states’ corrections departments in order to study the relationship between a given state’s level of implementation of the ban and its recidivism rates. I first perform a bivariate analysis of the aggregated recidivism data; then, I individually analyze six states (Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington) to determine the effects of the TANF and SNAP bans. The limited nature of accessible criminal justice data did not allow me to find a causal relationship between these variables, but my results do suggest that more lenient public assistance accessibility for released offenders may be correlated with declines in recidivism rates.
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Advisor
  • Hetherington, Marc
Degree
  • Bachelor of Arts
Academic concentration
  • Political Science
Honors level
  • Honors
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Graduation year
  • 2019
Language
  • English

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