Punishment and Inequality in America

5. The Labor Market After Prison

The Labor Market After Prison Through the end of the 1990s, the American labor market was celebrated for its dramatic job growth that contrasted with the stagnant employment figures coming out of western Europe. For young men at the bottom of the labor market, this triumphalism was premature. The mass incarceration of less-educated minority men concealed declining employment and produced phantom reductions in wage inequality. This invisible inequality defied buoyant assessments of American prosperity. The economic expansion slowed, but did not reverse, a thirty-year rise in American economic inequality. Termed “the new inequality,” the income distribution had spread more for men than women, and most clearly by levels of education.1 The wage gap between rich and poor men (measured by the ratio of the 90th to 10th percentile) widened by about 20 percent from 1973 to 2001. The wage advantage of college graduates over men with high school diplomas grew by 65 percent.2 Even though poverty and joblessness among disadvantaged men was hidden by the penal system, American economic inequality by the beginning of the new century was at its highest since World War II. The economic losers of the last thirty years, young minority men with little schooling, were also captives of the prison boom. The relationship between prison growth and falling wages among disadvantaged young men can CHAPTER 5 be interpreted several ways. Men with felony records have difficulty finding well-paid jobs. Some researchers have found that incarceration reduces earnings and employment.3 Perhaps the prison boom has contributed to U.S. earnings inequality, at least among young men, by reducing the wages and employment of criminal offenders after they have been released from prison. Of course, a different story could also be told. We saw in chapter 3 that falling wages and employment were closely associated with increasing imprisonment among young men with little schooling. Imprisonment increased largely because the criminal justice system had become more punishing . But these men were vulnerable to arrest in the first place because they were involved in violence and street crime more than most. If men with few legitimate job prospects resort to drug dealing or sticking up stores, unemployment and low pay may be due to a selection effect. Former prisoners may flounder on the labor market, not because they’ve been incarcerated, but because they lacked skills and work experience before they were first sent to prison. Here I examine how incarceration affects ex-prisoners’ employment, placing these effects in the context of the new inequality in the U.S. labor market . I treat incarceration as a key life event that triggers a cumulative spiral of disadvantage. Incarceration reduces not just the level of wages, it also slows wage growth over the life course and restricts the kinds of jobs that former inmates might find. Incarceration redirects the life path from the usual trajectory of steady jobs with career ladders that normally propels wage growth for young men. Men tangled in the justice system become permanent labor market outsiders, finding only temporary or unreliable jobs that offer little economic stability. Although this new class of stigmatized workers may swell the ranks of the severely disadvantaged, much of the analysis here also weighs the deficiencies of men involved in crime whose job prospects would be perilous even in the absence of incarceration. THE LABOR MARKET AND CRIMINAL OFFENDERS The young disadvantaged men who face the highest rates of incarceration are pulled in several directions as they try to make ends meet. The concentrated poverty of inner-city neighborhoods erodes the web of social connections that often restrains crime in urban areas. Lacking neighbors with their eyes on the street, and without much adult supervision for teenage males, THE LABOR MARKET AFTER PRISON 109 poor neighborhoods are acutely exposed to the risks of crime and delinquency .4 Economic incentives also contribute to the correlation between crime and poverty. Thus many researchers have linked the rise of the illegal drug trade and other street crime to the collapse of urban labor markets for less-skilled men.5 Crime provides an inviting alternative to a legitimate labor market where unemployment rates are desperately high. Drug dealing, robbery, thieving, and fencing stolen property can all help fill the economic gap in neighborhoods drained by deindustrialization of blue-collar jobs. This can be dangerous work, however, and as Levitt and Venkatesh showed in their research...