The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality

Abstract

A life course perspective on crime indicates that incarceration can disrupt key life transitions. Life course analysis of occupations finds that earnings mobility depends on stable employment in career jobs. These two lines of research thus suggest that incarceration reduces ex-inmates’ access to the steady jobs that usually produce earnings growth among young men. Consistent with this argument, evidence for slow wage growth among ex-inmates is provided by analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Because incarceration is so prevalent—one-quarter of black non-college males in the survey were interviewed between 1979 and 1998 while in prison or jail—the effect of imprisonment on individual wages also increases aggregate race and ethnic wage inequality.