Article | Spring 2007
Barriers to Prisoner Reentry: A Labor Market Perspective
From the very inception of the prison, its critics worried that this purported cure for crime actually propagated the disease. In modern parlance, they regarded the prison as an inherently criminogenic institution that perpetuated criminal behavior. This line of criticism is relevant today given that a potent rationale for current U.S. policies of mass incarceration is the public safety benefits from incapacitating actual offenders and deterring potential ones. However, if the prison experience hardens inmates into more serious offenders, the incarceration effect is at best transitory. Because the vast majorities of inmates Â"all come backÂ" to their communities, they can in principle perpetrate more serious crimes than prior to their initial incarceration.
This classic argument identifies a potential social cost of mass incarceration, which may negate the conventional utilitarian cost-benefit argument in its favor. Consider a case where a non-violent marginal drug offender is sentenced to prison rather than a drug court, a non-incarcerative alternative in which criminal justice and drug treatment professionals collaborate to rehabilitate patients.1 If the individual faces a greater likelihood of recidivism because of his prison experience, then the total social costs of these Â"get toughÂ" policies would include at least the additional harm from his post-release criminal activity and the administrative costs related to his subsequent arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.
There are a number of ways that prisons can exert a criminogenic influence on inmates. The most direct are through peer effects in which inmates are assimilated into prison culture and gang networks. My work focuses instead on an indirect mechanism, the impact of a prison record/experience on ex-inmatesÂ' labor market prospects and outcomes. Like other formative social institutions, the labor market is integral to the successful reentry and reintegration of released prisoners into their families and communities. Their path away from crime and future prison spells depends critically on their finding and holding a good job. In other words, recidivism risks vary directly with their labor market opportunities, measured by unemployment and real wage rates.
A prison record can close off this Â"desistanceÂ" pathway by increasing the barriers to the formal labor market, where prospects for steadier, higher paying employment are more likely. Employers may be less inclined to hire released prisoners, compared to other stigmatized groups, because of potential legal liabilities or merely a lack of trust. At the same time, the prison experience can significantly erode an inmateÂ's social and human capital and so diminish his or her chances of finding and holding a job. These labor market impacts are especially detrimental to young, less-educated inner city minority men, whose chances of finding a good job have steadily waned since the mid-1970s while their chances of winding up in prison have soared.
Since 1999, the Russell Sage Foundation working group on mass incarceration has accumulated and analyzed a variety of empirical evidence on these potential labor market Â"barriers to reentry.Â"2 In the space allotted here, I can only summarize the main findings. Examining supply and demand factors, the research finds a widening spatial mismatch between the concentration of released prisoners in inner-city neighborhoods and the increasingly suburban location of firms (in, say, manufacturing and construction) that are more likely to hire them. Released prisoners, in other words, have become more economically isolated in the Â"newÂ" urban labor market. At the peak of the late 1990s employment boom, employers did express a greater willingness to consider hiring released prisoners, but only those who had been convicted of less serious crimes and had some prior job experience. This exception, however, did not apply to young, less educated African American men, who were often regarded by employers as guilty until proven innocent.
The evidence provides strong support for the hypothesis that a prison record/experience confines ex-inmates to low-paying erratic jobs in the secondary labor market. It implies, moreover, that simply serving time in prison, not the length of time served, is the critical factor determining their poor employment prospects. These findings suggest how Â"sentencing matters,Â" at least in the labor market. The key policy reforms are mandatory minimum sentence laws, which increase the risk of imprisonment after an arrest and conviction, not laws increasing the minimum sentence length or truth-in-sentencing laws that require convicted offenders to serve out a longer fraction of their sentences. This finding is especially relevant to drug offenders whose higher incarceration rates are largely due to their greater imprisonment risk, not longer prison terms.
Finally, this research implies that the greater employability of released prisoners depends on direct interventions in the labor market, whether in the form of more targeted work-release programs and parole supervision or through employing a more macroeconomic approach to sustain high rates of economic and job growth. GED and vocational training programs, by contrast, may augment inmatesÂ' low or depreciated human capital, but do not seem to enhance their long-term employment prospects. For example, minority males who earn a GED in prison do experience significant, but only temporary, employment and earnings gains after their release.
The converse conclusion, moreover, is sobering. The significant Â"barriers to entryÂ" facing released prisoners do not preclude their Â"going straight,Â" but significantly diminish the odds. In other words, the labor market conditions facing released prisoners increase the likelihood that they will commit a technical parole violation, misdemeanor, or more serious felony offense that would land them back in prison. Although a comparison of prisoner cohorts released in 1983 and 1994 finds only modest evidence of a more rapidly revolving door of recidivism, there are two significant exceptions. Rearrest rates for released drug offenders jumped from 50 percent to 66 percent over the decade. And although not strictly comparable, reincarceration rates between 1983 and 1994, including for parole revocations, increased sharply from 41 to 52 percent for all released prisoners and from 30 to 49 percent for drug offenders. Significantly, the recent rash of technical parole violations accounted for around half of all returning prisoners among the 1994 cohort.
The increasing flux of prison admissions for technical parole violations, rather than new commitments on a new felony conviction, has contributed to the persistent high rates of incarceration despite the recent abundant evidence of sharp declines in criminal offenses. Given the limited effectiveness of current prison and parole programs and the dim political prospects for more sustained and substantial micro and macro labor market interventions to assist ex-inmates, an obvious policy solution is to divert marginal offenders from the holds of imprisonment through a non-incarcerative alternative such as drug courts. Through recent random assignment and quasi-experimental studies, this treatment has been shown to be effective in reducing the risk and social costs of recidivism, especially for Â"jugglers,Â" less serious offenders who commit drug crimes to feed their habits.
David Weiman is the Alena Wels Hirschorn Professor of Economics at Barnard College and is a faculty member in History at Columbia University. His research focuses on the economic and social impacts of mass incarceration, the historical development of the banking and telecommunications industries, the political economy of the American South, and U.S. postsecondary education. Weiman has also been a Senior Program Officer at the Russell Sage Foundation.
1 Throughout this article, I consider War on Drugs policies and marginal drug offenders for several reasons. Firstly, the War on Drugs constituted a true social experiment, a dramatic shift in criminal justice policy that cannot be simply explained by the greater prevalence or severity of drug and drug-related crimes. Secondly, these policies were quantitatively important in instituting the regime of mass incarceration. And finally, these policies indiscriminately incarcerated not just serious but marginal offenders, particularly young, less-educated inner-city minority men (and increasingly women) who sell and use small quantities of illegal drugs.
2 See Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), and Shawn Bushway, Michael A. Stoll, and David F. Weiman, eds., Barriers to Reentry? The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Postindustrial America (forthcoming).
