Considering Incentives in Money Generating Activities among an Incarcerated Sample

• In Event: Examining the Employment and Crime Relationship

Abstract

The relationship between stable employment and crime is an important topic both from a theoretical and policy perspective. To date, research has predominately focused on how legal employment moves individuals away from informal and criminal activities. However, for individuals who have an offending history, employment commonly consists of multiple transitions between employment, informal work and money generating criminal activities (Laub and Sampson, 2003; Giordano et al., 2003). In the summer of 2016, we will survey a sample of inmates from Pennsylvania state prisons to gain a better understanding of how various sources of income overlap and the incentives associated with each income source. The project is driven by three main research questions: 1) What are the patterns of participation in legal employment, informal employment and money generating crimes? 2) How are monetary returns from legal, informal and crime related to participation in each? 3) How are perceptions of rewards (monetary, intrinsic and social) associated with participation in legal, informal, and money generating criminal activities? Preliminary results of this study will be presented.

Authors

• Holly Nguyen, Pennsylvania State University

• Jeremy Staff, Pennsylvania State University

• Gary Zajac, Pennsylvania State University

• Derek Kreager, Pennsylvania State University

• Thomas Loughran, University of Maryland