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Incarceration and unwed fathers in Fragile Families.

Article Excerpt
Criminal justice policies have resulted in millions of Americans being incarcerated over the past three decades in systems that provide little or no rehabilitation. This study uses a new dataset--The Fragile Families Study--to document poor labor market outcomes that are associated with incarceration. We find that fathers who had been incarcerated earned 28 percent less annually than fathers who were never incarcerated These previously incarcerated fathers worked less weeks per year, less hours per week and were less likely to be working during the week prior to their interview. We also found that fathers who had been incarcerated were more likely to depend on underground employment and off-the-books earnings.

Keywords: Earnings, employment, employment probability, ex-offenders, fathers, incarceration, labor market, offenders, prison, prison reentry

Introduction

For nearly three decades, the United States has employed crime control policies that have resulted in a tremendous expansion of its prison population--from 300,000 in 1972 to more than 2.2 million at mid-year 2005 (Harrison & Beck, 2006). The rate of Americans incarcerated in prisons and jails reached 738 per 100,000 in 2005, up from 725 in 2002 and up from 458 as late as 1990. One in every 136 United States residents was behind bars at mid-year 2005 (Harrison & Beck, 2006). At yearend 2001, a total of 5,618,000 American adults--one in 37--had been incarcerated in state or federal prisons at some point in their lifetimes (Bonczar, 2003).

In recent years, policymakers' attention has turned to the growing numbers of formerly incarcerated persons now returning to communities with deficits associated with incarceration. Since 1996, more than 500,000 prisoners have left prisons and jails each year and returned to their communities. These numbers are expected to increase dramatically in the coming years. More than 660,000 prisoners were released in 2002. That number was expected to grow to 887,000 in 2005 and 1,200,000 in 2010. It is expected that more than 3.5 million prisoners will be released during the decade (Beck, 2000; Hughes & Wilson, 2003).

Released prisoners most often return to struggling communities where they find difficulty securing the stable employment, housing and social services needed for successful reintegration (Austin, 2001; Clear, Rose, & Ryder, 2001; La Vigne & Cowan, 2005; Travis & Petersilia, 2001;). Two-thirds are arrested and half are returned to prison within three years of their release (Langan & Levin, 2002).

Researchers have sought to document deficits associated with incarceration in order to employ policies that will increase returning prisoners' chances of successful reentry into society and reduce high levels of recidivism that keep incarceration rates climbing. If indeed incarceration erodes successful labor market chances, than corrective and rehabilitative programs may be useful during periods of incarceration (Freeman, 2003; Zhang, Roberts & Callanan, 2006).

One thorny issue is the fact that those who enter prison are often likely to have inherent human capital deficits that are associated with poor labor market outcomes--poor schooling, mental health issues, and substance abuse problems. A new national data set--the Fragile Families Study--provides new measures that allow us to control for these factors while previous studies do not and to further isolate the incarceration effect.

We discover the unwed fathers in our study who had been incarcerated during some point in their lives are in many ways not significantly different from those who had never been imprisoned. By examining the post-incarceration labor market experiences of these unwed fathers, we test the hypothesis that incarceration is significantly associated with poor labor market outcomes.

The Fragile Families Study also contains measures of participation and earnings in the underground economy. Thus we are able to test the hypothesis that fathers who had been incarcerated would more likely resort to illegitimate means for income. Last, as an added control, we include differences in state incarceration rates by race as an instrument to predict individual incarceration rates.

The Fragile Families Study

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study--a joint effort by Princeton University's Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW) and the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and Columbia University's Social Indicators Survey Center and the National Center for Children and Families (NCCF)--is tracking a cohort of children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large cities in the United States (http://crcw.princeton.edu).

All mothers who gave birth during the data collection period were approached in the hospital and asked to participate in the study. Approximately 93% of the mothers agreed to participate and provided locating information about the fathers, who were contacted at the hospital or shortly after the birth of the child. Approximately 75% of unmarried fathers and 90% of married fathers agreed to participate.

The baseline dataset includes 4,898 completed mother interviews (1,186 marital births and 3,712 non-marital births) and 3,830 completed father interviews. One-year follow-up interviews were conducted between June 1999 and March 2002. The one-year data set includes 4,365 completed mother interviews and 3,367 completed father interviews. We use the full 20-city sample for our study because the nationally representative sample is substantially smaller (1300 fewer observations), and more important, the differences between descriptive statistics in the two samples are minimal (generally 0-1% and maximum 3%).

Unmarried births were oversampled and we restrict our analysis to unmarried fathers to increase homogeneity between fathers who...

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