Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (review)

A major consequence of mass incarceration in the United States is that close to 700,000 prisoners will be released from state and federal prisons each year for the foreseeable future. In Marked, Devah Pager provides a well-researched and well-written book discussing the impact of criminal record and race on the employment prospects of formerly incarcerated persons. This book contributes to a growing body of literature examining prisoner reentry, while also contributing to the literature about the impact of stigma and discrimination.

Following an introduction which carefully lays out the logic and plan for the book, Pager explains the reasons for the drastic rise of incarceration in the United States as well as the problems of prisoner reentry into society. She follows this chapter with a discussion of how incarceration contributes to negative employment outcomes.

An important contribution of this book is its attention to issues of measurement for studying the labor market consequences of incarceration. In Chapter 3 the author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches that have been used to measure this phenomenon. The author then provides a detailed description of the study’s experimental audit methodology chosen for its usefulness in “measuring discrimination in real-world settings.” In this study, matched pairs of individuals (called testers) posed as job applicants in real job searches. The testers were given fictitious resumes with the only differences being their race (black vs. white) and assignment of a criminal record (a felony drug conviction and 18 months served in prison). A total of 350 employers in the greater Milwaukee area were audited. The author provides a lengthy discussion in Appendix 4A of the audit design and the many steps taken to preserve the integrity of the study.

The early stage of the employment process is examined with the primary outcome of interest the proportion of applications that elicited call backs from employers or were offered the job on the spot. In chapters 4 through 6 the author discusses the extent to which persons were discriminated against in the hiring process because of their criminal record and/or their race. Pager found that formerly incarcerated persons are half (for whites) to a third (for blacks) as likely to receive a call back from employers as compared to applicants without criminal records. Among those without criminal records, blacks were less than half as likely to receive call backs as equally qualified whites (14 vs. 34 percent). In what might be the most surprising and important finding in this study, a white applicant with a criminal record was just as likely to receive a call back as a black applicant without a criminal record (17 vs. 14 percent). Moreover, the extremely low call back rate for black formerly incarcerated persons (5 percent) indicates that for these applicants, “with two strikes, you’re out.” Pager contextualizes these findings by analyzing the impact that personal contact with employers and the location of the employer (city vs. suburb) have on the likelihood of call backs.

In Chapter 7 Pager provides valuable information about employers’ considerations and concerns in evaluating applicants. Interviews with the same sample found that employers are very concerned about the potential liability of hiring persons with criminal records and are also sensitive to the type of conviction. Meanwhile, minority-owned businesses are much more likely to express a willingness to hire persons with criminal records, while employers who have hired an applicant with a criminal record in the past year are more likely to report favorable attitudes towards hiring these applicants.

Throughout the book, Pager argues that the results of this study are conservative and perhaps represent a best case scenario for the employment prospects of persons with criminal records because of the favorable characteristics of the testers and the sample of employers audited. In the final chapter Pager discusses several prisoner reentry-related policy recommendations including “avoiding the mark” by sending fewer...