Does Uberization of the Labor Market Impact Women’s and Men’s Incarceration Rates?

• In Event: Empirical Advances in Critical Criminology

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to answer the call for mid-range theories of punishment (Garland, 2018) by testing Wacquant’s (2009) economic explanation of the mass incarceration while expanding the scope of the theory to incorporate the neglected political processes of partisan competition. To this end, I employ hierarchical multivariate linear models (HMLM) to simultaneously analyze women’s and men’s incarceration rates in the US as a function of the labor market flexibility and political competition between 1980 and 2020. Then, I employ maximum likelihood structural equation modeling (ML-SEM) to address the possibility of reverse causality (Vasiliev, 2023). Preliminary HMLM results are supportive of Wacquant’s (2009) thesis that the flexible laissez-faire labor markets are associated with increased incarceration rates while ML-SEM results are pending.

Author

• Pavel Vasiliev, Ohio University