The Effects of Community Supervision on Recidivism and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

• In Event: Mass Probation and Inequality: The Purpose, Form, and Effects of Probation

Abstract

Community supervision, primarily in the form of probation, has grown substantially over the past four decades. Yet, this expansion in community supervision and its attendant consequences are understudied. Existing research offers two competing perspectives on the effect of probation: (1) the rehabilitative perspective suggests that probation reforms offenders by treating and deterring criminiogenic behaviors; (2) the net-widening perspective contends that probation is punitive and deepens involvement with the criminal justice system. In this study, we offer an explicit test of these competing hypotheses by examining the effects of being sentenced to jail with probation compared to only jail on recidivism and labor market outcomes. We exploit the random assignment of criminal cases to judges to estimate the effects of probation supervision and probation length using administrative data on all individuals sentenced to a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006. Our results indicate that for individuals sentenced to jail, the addition of probation can serve important rehabilitative functions and induce greater labor market participation. This has important implications for inequality because of differential selection into probation as a criminal sanction. We observe that white offenders are more likely to be granted probation in combination with jail compared to nonwhite offenders.

Authors

• Anh P. Nguyen, University of Michigan

• David J. Harding, University of California, Berkeley

• Jeffrey D. Morenoff, University of Michigan

• Shawn Bushway, University at Albany, SUNY