Dr. Kevin Wozniak (Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology), Prof. Justin Pickett (University at Albany), and Dr. Elizabeth Brown (University of Massachusetts Boston) published a new paper in the American Journal of Criminal Justice. The study, titled "Dangerous or Lazy: An Experimental Analysis of Defendant Characteristics and Public Support for Collateral Consequence Restrictions," tested how different characteristics of defendants affect American public support for denying people with criminal records the right to vote, the right to a gun and the right to access public benefits through the welfare state. Through a survey experiment, Dr. Wozniak and his coauthors found that cues about both the nature of a hypothetical defendant's crime and his work ethic significantly affected public support for "collateral consequence" restrictions. Respondents expressed significantly less support for restoring all three types of rights to defendants who had been presented as committing a violent robbery and were described as lazy vs. defendants who committed nonviolent identity theft and were described as hardworking. The violence cue had a substantially greater impact on support for gun rights than the laziness cue. In the aggregate, though, the data indicate that a firm majority of Americans supports restoring voting rights and welfare access to people with criminal records, but Americans are much more split on the question of restoring gun rights. Dr. Wozniak and his coauthors discuss how the mass public's attitudes do and do not align with courts' jurisprudence regarding collateral consequences in the U.S. The full article is available open access here.