2007 Small Grants Program: Incarceration, Criminal Justice Policy and Poverty
Funded research
Christopher Lyons, University of New Mexico, and Becky Pettit, University of Washington.
Employment Discontinuities and Wage Declines: Race Differences in the Cumulative Effects of Incarceration.
Description
Spending time in prison has become an increasingly common life event for low-skill minority men in the U.S. The Bureau of Justice Statistics now estimates that one in three Black men can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetimes. A growing body of work implicates the prison system in contemporary accounts of racial inequality across a host of social, economic, and political domains. However, comparatively little work has examined the impact of the massive growth of the prison system – and growing inequality in exposure to the prison system – on racial inequality over the life course. Using a unique data set drawn from state administrative records, this project examines how spending time in prison affects accumulated work experience and wage trajectories over a 14-year period. We explore how racial differences in both the likelihood of imprisonment and the effects of spending time in prison inform our understanding of widening racial inequality in employment, earnings, and exposure to poverty through adulthood.
We assembled an administrative data set that links demographic data, criminal histories, and educational credentials including GED test scores, with quarterly employment, hours, and earnings data from Unemployment Insurance (UI) records. The data include 57 quarters of information for more than 10,000 individuals who were admitted to and released from prison between 1990 and 2000. We use these data to investigate the effect of spending time in prison on wage trajectories and whether the effect of incarceration on wages varies by race. Using a partial adjustment model, we examine how employment discontinuities associated with spending time in prison affect initial wages, potential wages, and the rate of wage growth for whites and blacks. Our data include a particularly rich set of covariates that enable the investigation of spending time in prison while controlling for educational attainment, GED test scores, conditions of confinement, and prior criminal history.
While prior research has examined how cognitive differences, educational investments, and differential work experience influence racial inequality in wages, wealth, and exposure to poverty, the massive build-up in the criminal justice system – and its disproportionate effects on low-skill minority men – calls for further examination of the determinants of racial inequality in employment and wages over the life course. Discontinuities in work experience associated with incarceration may broaden our understanding of racial divergence in wages through adulthood, and thereby underscore the causal relevance of recent policy interventions in the persistence of racial inequality.
