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Incarceration and the Legitimate Labor Market: Examining Age-Graded Effects on Employment and Wages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Becky Pettit  and
Christopher J. Lyons
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Abstract

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. inmate population has increased dramatically, and the penal system has acquired growing attention in accounts of recent trends in economic stratification. As the prison system has expanded, its population has aged; incarceration rates have risen sharpest among older age groups. A large body of research documents differences in criminal offending and incarceration over the life course, but little attention has been paid to how the effects of spending time in prison depend on the timing of incarceration in the life course. Using state administrative data that provide significant variance in the age of offenders, this article investigates how the timing of incarceration in the life course influences its effects on post-release employment and wages. We do not find consistent evidence that incarceration effects vary by age at admission. Instead, incarceration appears to have important consequences for employment and wage outcomes regardless of when individuals are admitted to prison. Even the most motivated offenders suffer sizeable and significant wage penalties and, over time, decreased likelihood of employment. These findings underscore the relevance of legal and institutional shifts associated with carceral expansion and the aging of the inmate population for life course theories of criminal desistance, accounts of labor market inequality, and prisoner reentry programs.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 725 - 756
Copyright
© 2009 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Elizabeth Drake, Carmen Grose, Jeff Jaksich, Michael Scroggins, and Peggy Smith for assistance with data acquisition; Patty Glynn for help with the data analysis; and Katherine Beckett, Shawn Bushway, Jerry Herting, and Derek Kreager for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, and the article was revised while the first author was a visiting scholar at Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation.

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