Abstract
When a person is convicted of a felony offense, they lose the right to vote, the candidacy to sit on a jury, the ability to hold public office, and the right to own firearms. In addition, civil rights revocation also denies the eligibility of certain occupational licenses and state-funded scholarships. It is unknown, a priori, if civil right status influences labor market outcomes, voting behavior, or educational attainment, any of which may affect incentives for convicted felons to re-offend. As an aggregate measure of these channels, I analyze the casual link between civil rights restoration and rates of recidivism. To establish this relationship, this paper uses variation in the Rules of Executive Clemency, which affect an ex-felons’ ability to restore their civil rights. I find that restoring an individual’s civil rights reduces their probability to recidivate by 18 percentage points, which translates to a reduction in the overall recidivism rates by 1 percentage point.
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