Race Talk to Change Carceral Attitudes: A Field Experiment on Deep Canvass Organizing

Deep canvassing is one of few attitude-change interventions repeatedly shown to work, yet it has not been examined in the context of anticarceral issues. Scholars and advocates also debate whether we should discuss race when promoting racial equity policies—with some concluding we should avoid race and others calling for further development and testing of a variety of methods. This study addresses both gaps by assessing the effects of race-explicit and race-absent deep canvass conversations on increasing support for anticarceral policies and on changing dominant carceral attitudes. Through a randomized, placebo-controlled field experiment of more than 1,400 canvass conversations with Los Angeles County voters, I find that deep canvassing is effective in building support for anticarceral policies. Race-explicit and race-absent approaches have similar effects on policy opinions, but the race-explicit condition may be the only method that changes underlying ideological attitudes about the carceral state.