The Effects of Jail Incarceration on Employment and Recidivism: Evidence from a Natural Experiment.

• In Event: 4448 - New Directions and Innovation in the Study of Crime and Justice

Abstract

Previous research on mass incarceration finds that imprisonment is associated with poorer labor market outcomes and greater criminal recidivism. Less research, however, has examined whether or to what extent jails produce similar consequences. The experience of incarceration in jail may be very different from imprisonment owing to institutional differences. Thus, jails are a potentially significant but substantially overlooked aspect of the penal state. Using rich administrative data, we leverage a natural experiment that relies upon the random assignment of judges to felony cases to estimate the causal effects of receiving a combined jail and probation sentence compared to a probation only sentence. Our results show that a jail sentence increases the risk of future prison admission among people also sentenced to probation but have no effect on arrests or felony convictions. We find that most of the effect of a jail sentence on new prison admissions is driven by greater risk of technical violations of probation conditions, suggesting that intensification of criminal justice system involvement is produced by the system itself. A jail sentence also leads to poorer labor market outcomes, suggesting that jail may be as important as prison as a driver of inequality.

Authors

• Michael Ryan Menefee, University of California Berkeley

• David J. Harding, University of California at Berkeley

• Anh P. Nguyen, University of Michigan

• Jeffrey Morenoff, University of Michigan

• Shawn Bushway, UAlbany