Locked Out of the Labor Market? State-Level Hidden Sentences and the Labor Market Outcomes of Recently Incarcerated Young Adults

Abstract

A long literature attests to labor market penalties for having a criminal record. No research, however, has explored whether state-level policies that restrict social participation of the justice-involved contribute to these labor market consequences. Such policies, or hidden sentences, have clear implications for labor market outcomes but are difficult to measure. In this article, we leverage a combination of nationally representative individual data and state-level data on hidden sentences to ask whether the labor market penalties of incarceration are contingent on a state’s hidden sentence regime in young adulthood. Our results demonstrate that living in a state with moderate and high hidden sentences exacerbates the labor market consequences of incarceration, and that this pattern may contribute to racial disparities in labor market outcomes following incarceration.

Keywords

• incarceration
• employment
• earnings
• hidden sentences