The prison reform paradox persists: Rehabilitation capacity, character judgments, and racial resentment predict...

For those who value both retributive justice and community safety, criminal justice reform poses a fundamental tension. Public preferences for severe punishment often exceed the formal sentence imposed, and this extralegal suffering is associated with higher recidivism, making communities less safe.

We hypothesized that framing rehabilitation as serving retributive justice goals, rather than reducing recidivism, would generate greater public support for prison reform and that information about prison cruelty and recidivism would interact with framing to affect reform attitudes, moral character judgments, and rehabilitation capacity beliefs.

We employed a factorial between-participant design to assess how information regarding prisons (rehabilitation programs, cruel prison conditions, or recidivism statistics) and its framing (justice vs. utilitarian focused) affected support for reform. A no-message control condition was included. A U.S. quota sample (N = 1,110) recruited from Prolific Academic was randomly assigned to one of seven conditions and completed measures of prison reform, moral character, rehabilitation capacity, and perceived justice restoration.

Because people tend to prioritize retributive over utilitarian concerns in criminal justice judgments, we expected justice-focused framing to increase reform support. Contrary to this expectation, beliefs about an incarcerated person's capacity for rehabilitation and levels of racial resentment were the strongest predictors of reform support. The proposed sequential mediation model was not supported, but a parallel model showed that viewing prisoners as having higher moral character increased beliefs in their ability to change, which, in turn, predicted greater reform support.

Attitudes toward prison reform were largely unaffected by brief messaging interventions. Because reform support was driven more by prior beliefs, effective advocacy may require long-term efforts to change perceptions about prisoner character and potential. This research highlights the challenge of resolving the tension between the desire for punishment and public safety in a polarized ideological climate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).