Abstract
A long literature attests to labor market penalties for having a criminal record. No research, however, has explored whether state-level policies that restrict social participation of the justice-involved contribute to these labor market consequences. Such policies, or hidden sentences, have clear implications for labor market outcomes but are difficult to measure. In this article, we leverage a combination of nationally representative individual data and state-level data on hidden sentences to ask whether the labor market penalties of incarceration are contingent on a state’s hidden sentence regime in young adulthood. Our results demonstrate that living in a state with moderate and high hidden sentences exacerbates the labor market consequences of incarceration, and that this pattern may contribute to racial disparities in labor market outcomes following incarceration.
- © 2020 Russell Sage Foundation. Warner, Cody, Joshua Kaiser, and Jason N. Houle. 2020. “Locked Out of the Labor Market? State-Level Hidden Sentences and the Labor Market Outcomes of Recently Incarcerated Young Adults.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 6(1): 132–51. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2020.6.1.06. Direct correspondence to: Cody Warner at cody.warner{at}montana.edu, Montana State University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, 2-128 Wilson Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.