Criminal Justice Debt, Employment, and Recidivism

• In Event: Incarceration, Reentry and Recidivism

Abstract

We analyzed data from the multi‐state SVORI initiative to examine the impacts of child support debt on various outcomes in prisoner reentry, including later self‐reported crime and official arrest. In addition, since employment has been implicated as a perennial hurdle in prisoner reentry, and increasingly stringent child support laws might create disincentives to finding employment, we examined how this debt affects the likelihood of entering the legitimate labor market, as well as whether it increases the odds of entering illicit economies. Results from generalized structural equation models show the impacts of debt on recidivism and employment using all waves of the data, in addition we treat the outcome variables as endogenous, and examine the contemporaneous and lagged impacts they have on each other over time.

Authors

• Nathan Link, Temple University

• Caterina Roman, Temple University