In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Preface David F. Weiman T his volume originally grew out of the joint Russell Sage Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation research program on the Future of Work. Since 1994 the program has mobilized scholars from various social science disciplines to analyze the profound changes in U.S. labor markets since the 1970s, as evidenced by the steady erosion in the real hourly earnings of less-educated workers and the widening earnings gap between more- and less-educated workers (see, for example , Card and Blank 2000; Bernhardt et al. 2001; Applebaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane 2003). In addition to explaining the underlying causes of these large cumulative shifts in the levels and distribution of earnings, the research probed their social impacts on less-educated workers and explored the policy responses that would cushion economic impacts on these workers and bolster their labor-market prospects. These concerns may seem to be unrelated to the issues discussed in this volume, but in fact the large cumulative shifts in less-skilled labor markets and mass incarceration are closely linked. After a lengthy debate sparked by David Cantor and Kenneth C. Land (1985), recent research has shown a direct causal link between the declining real wages and higher unemployment levels of less-educated workers and their criminal activity, especially “economic” crimes such as burglary and drug trafficking (see also Weiman, Stoll, and Bushway, chapter 2, this volume). Moreover, research in political economy and sociology strongly suggests that the politicization of street crime and the ultimate adoption of “get tough” criminal justice policies was a policy response, albeit symbolic , to the economic turbulence and labor-market dislocations between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s (see, for example, Garland 2001 and the discussion in Western, chapter 11, this volume). Together, these findings showed the relevance of “crime and punishix x Barriers to Reentry? ment” matters to the Future of Work research agenda. Moreover, a review of the extant literature clearly justified strategic intervention to address the complementary issue of how a prison experience affects the labor-market prospects of those on the socioeconomic margins. At the time, few had studied this problem despite the rapid increase in U.S. incarceration rates since the late 1970s. And these researchers had reached divergent conclusions. According to one strand of research, a prison record and experience significantly diminished employment levels and earnings of ex-offenders, and so increased their likelihood of recidivism and a return to prison. A second set of studies, however, found that prison had no long-term effect on ex-convicts’ labor-market outcomes. After a preliminary meeting of scholars in fall 1999, the Russell Sage Foundation formed a working group on mass incarceration, which I coordinated. We framed our mandate in terms of a simple question: Does the increasing use of incarceration, especially for economic crimes by relatively marginal offenders, reinforce or just ratify their already poor labor-market prospects? The composition of the working group and the scope of the research agenda naturally co-evolved over time; the group included several members of the Future of Work Advisory Committee and the Russell Sage Foundation board of directors. My job as coordinator was to remind participants of two constraints on their research projects. Consistent with the Future of Work program agenda, they had to focus their research at least initially on the labor-market impacts of a prison record. Second, time and resource constraints meant that they should exploit as much as possible extant data sources. Since the formation of the working group, the Foundation has funded over a dozen research projects in this area and has also supported the activities of several visiting scholars with related research interests. The contributions to this volume as well as several in its predecessor , Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration, on the social effects of mass incarceration, are based on the first round of research grants (Pattillo, Weiman, and Western 2004). The initial research proposals revolved around a core research design to track prisoners ’ post-release labor-market outcomes and recidivism rates. Because of the intrinsic difficulties and hence significant cost of following released prisoners over time, working-group members decided on a pragmatic course. They strategically selected states that accounted for a large share of the prison population but that varied in their criminal justice policies. They then assembled comprehensive longitudinal data sets based on the administrative records of their corrections departments and, if possible, linked them to records from law enforcement and employment agencies. A second...

Share