Criminal Legal Contact and the Nature of Work: The Effect of Incarceration on Occupational Characteristics

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 11: Life Course Outcomes

Abstract

While literature on labor market consequences of criminal justice contact focuses on earnings and employment, it has largely overlooked a core tenet of sociological research: occupations. Earnings-based analyses obscure mechanisms of inequality, including location in the occupational structure, skill utilization, and job characteristics. Bridging intragenerational perspectives on occupational mobility with theories on criminal justice contact as a negative turning point in the life course, I investigate whether and how incarceration shapes inequality by altering the nature of work. I construct multidimensional gradational occupational factors using Occupational Information Network data, link factors to longitudinal event-history data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort, and employ advanced staggered difference-in-differences estimators to identify the causal effects of first incarceration on occupational characteristics. Findings reveal that people occupy marginalized locations in the occupation structure prior to incarceration. Yet, incarceration significantly decreases levels of autonomy and on-the-job training, mechanical operations, and field work/public safety work in occupations held post-incarceration, while increasing levels of low-skill care work. These shifts suggest systematic processes of occupational relegation due to incarceration.

Author

• Avery Warner, University of Wisconsin-Madison