Pounding the Pavement: Trajectories of Job Searching and Working After Prison

• In Event: Criminal Records, Employment and Prisoner Reentry

Abstract

Despite the importance of finding employment at reentry, individuals face substantial barriers. Although the obstacles are well documented, there is comparatively little understanding about responses to these barriers and actual searching and working experiences. Recent research suggests that reentering individuals may be self-selecting out of the labor force, choosing to exit a market in which they are highly disadvantaged. This paper focuses on the searching and working trajectories of ex-inmates in the immediate months after prison, using unique person-day information collected from smartphones. Participants were sampled from a complete census of recent releases in Newark, New Jersey, and 135 individuals were followed for three months via smartphones. The participation and completion rates were high (89 and 70 percent, respectively). Using sequence analysis methods, the paper describes a reentry period characterized by greater instability, irregularity, and heterogeneity than previous scholarship suggests. The findings identify three distinct typologies of reentering individuals, where the majority search for work at release but exit the labor market shortly thereafter without success. Individuals that are particularly disadvantaged sustain high levels of search throughout the three months. Although the results describe dire employment prospects at reentry, they indicate that services targeted at specific subgroups hold promise.

Author

• Naomi Sugie, Princeton University