Josh Miller, 27, considers himself “a laid-back person who enjoys meeting new people,” his online dating profile said. “Spending time with my family and friends is very important to me, especially since I missed so many years with them while I was in prison,” the profile continued. Then Miller wrote, “I always try to remain positive and be in a good mood, despite my experiences being incarcerated.”
Miller’s education includes some college; he works as a bartender; and he likes to work out. The photo shows a white man with a big smile, but in reality, Miller only exists in “Vignette Profile Shown to Women in Condition 3W” of the research paper “Love at First Profile: An Experiment Exploring if Previously Incarcerated Individuals are Less Desirable While Online Dating,” by Carina L. Perrone from West Virginia University.
Perrone’s paper set out to find whether former hard timers have a hard time on the dating scene. Her research attempts to fill a gap in literature on the subject and explore the extent to which “dating might be considered yet another casualty of mass incarceration.”
“The purpose of this study is to determine if incarceration has a negative effect on dating,” Perrone wrote, and the study used “men and women in order to gain a better understanding of whether gender has an effect on dating when it is attached to an incarcerated background.”
To clarify, this research paper deals with single heterosexual returning citizens who would like to engage in activities with someone of the opposite sex. The paper does not discuss returning citizens who have returned to their partners after incarceration. It discusses finding dates online, which Perrone calls the dominant mode of finding dates. It does not discuss returned citizens who acquire dates through friends or at work.
In short, the paper talks about men and women who left prison, do not know anyone, and go online to meet someone of the opposite sex with whom to go to a bar or a movie.
The study acknowledges the important limitation that “most online dating platforms prohibit felons from creating profiles and using the sites.” Anyone with misdemeanor or a minor convictions may still participate in online dating, said the paper.
The researcher worked around this limitation by having the fictitious profiles omit either the reason or the length of the incarceration. The person in the profile might have spent 10 days in jail for petty theft or 10 years in prison for manslaughter. Viewers of the profile would not know unless they would contact the persons in the profile, which would indicate interest in dating them.
Perrone’s study had a limited age range (22 to 35 years old) for respondents and only accepted respondents that identified as either woman or man and as heterosexual.
The results look less than encouraging. A table that showed “Acceptability of Incarceration Length for a Potential Partner by Gender” answered the critical question of “how long is too long for a potential partner to be incarcerated for before they were considered ‘undatable’” and the results put a cutoff of datability at months of incarceration for both men and women respondents (see graphic).
More than 35% of women would not consider dating a man with an incarceration history at all. Datability declines sharply after three months of incarceration from 60% to 46%. Anyone in prison for longer than three years might expect a response of 25% and anyone in prison for ten years might expect a response of about 10%.
The dating scene for previously incarcerated women looks marginally better. About 23% of men would not consider dating a former woman prisoner at all, but half of all men would consider dating someone in prison for a year.
For women incarcerated longer than one year, chances of finding a date online declines sharply by 28 percentage points. Only about 22% of men would consider a woman released after three years and a mere 14.5% would consider a woman who spent eight years in prison.
Because of high rates of incarceration, the researcher said, “The goal of this research is to help de-stigmatize perceptions surrounding incarceration because the likelihood of coming in contact with someone who was incarcerated is relatively high.”
Residents found the results of the study disappointing.
“It’s not fair, said Donald Thompson, a Donner Section resident. “We have served our time and bettered ourselves, and we are not our crimes.” He added, “We deserve a chance.”
