Racialized re-entry: Labor market inequality after incarceration
Abstract
Why do some people succeed in the labor market after incarceration but others do not? We study the transition from prison to work with data on monthly employment and earnings for a sample of men and women observed for a year after incarceration. More than in earlier research, the data provide detailed measurement of temporary and informal employment and richly describe the labor market disadvantages of formerly incarcerated men and women. We find that half the sample is jobless in any given month and average earnings are well below the poverty level. By jointly modeling employment and earnings, we show that blacks and Hispanics have lower total earnings than whites even after accounting for health, human capital, social background, crime and criminal justice involvement, and job readiness. A decomposition attributes most of the earnings gaps to racial and ethnic inequalities in employment. Qualitative interviews suggest that whites more than blacks and Hispanics find stable, high-paying jobs through social networks. These findings support a hypothesis of racialized re-entry that helps explain the unusual disadvantage of African Americans at the nexus of the penal system and the labor market.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Upon release, many transition-age Black males return to the same historically marginalized communities where they were arrested.
“Upon release, many transition-age Black males return to the same historically marginalized communities (HMC) where they were arrested (Payne et al., 2019;Rovner, 2024;Western & Sirois, 2019; J. M. Williams et al., 2019).”
From School Reentry: Exploring Healing-Centered Mechanisms for Formerly Incarcerated Transition-Age Black Males in an Urban Intensive, Asset-Based Alternative School (2026) · cites this paper as Western & Sirois, 2019
While participants described employment and employability as essential to the students' school reentry processes, these findings must be understood within the context of a racially stratified and exclusionary labor market that systematically limits opportunities for formerly incarcerated Black male students.
“While participants described employment and employability as essential to the students' school reentry processes, these findings must be understood within the context of a racially stratified and exclusionary labor market that systematically limits opportunities for formerly incarcerated Black male students (Pager et al., 2009;Western & Sirois, 2019).”
From School Reentry: Exploring Healing-Centered Mechanisms for Formerly Incarcerated Transition-Age Black Males in an Urban Intensive, Asset-Based Alternative School (2026) · cites this paper as Western & Sirois, 2019
Cites
Pager, D. (2003) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/374403 · Cited by 2,840 · see citing works
Incarceration and Stratification
Wakefield, S., & Uggen, C. (2010) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102551 · Cited by 747 · see citing works
Unemployment and Substance Use: A Review of the Literature (1990-2010)
Henkel, D. (2011) · Current Drug Abuse Reviewse · doi:10.2174/1874473711104010004 · Cited by 590 · see citing works
Incarceration length, employment, and earnings
Kling, J. R. (2006) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.96.3.863 · Cited by 563 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Lea, C. H., Brown, M., & Bhatt, R. (2023) · Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal · doi:10.1007/s10560-022-00907-8 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Lea, C. H., Sardesai, T., Edwards, K. T., Andrade, G. M., & Kim, B.-K. E. (2026) · Education Sciences · doi:10.3390/educsci16040653
- Authors
- Western, B., & Sirois, C.
- Affiliations
- Columbia University (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Western, Bruce
- Venue
- Social Forces
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2018-10-01
- Volume
- 97
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1517-1542
- ISSN
- 0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
- 1534-7605
- OpenAlex
- W2895720242
- Cited by
- 101
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 11.38
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model (vor)
- Locations
- Social Forces (publishedVersion)
- Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research
- Keywords
- prisoner reentry, incarceration, racial inequality, wage inequality, black-white earnings gap, informal employment, temporary employment, social networks, labour market disadvantage, African Americans, criminal justice involvement
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
