Community Context, Prisoner Reentry, and Post-Prison Employment

Investigators:   Jeffrey Morenoff, David J. Harding

The rising number of individuals being released from prison has prompted renewed interest among academics and policy makers in integrating former prisoners back into society. Still, relatively little is known about how the communities into which former prisoners move when they leave prison affect the likelihood that they will secure stable employment and not return to prison. The proposed research would focus on the role that community context plays in predicting (a) the likelihood of parolees securing stable and gainful employment and (b) the risk of recidivism (e.g., parole violation or revocation and recommitment to prison) by collecting and analyzing administrative records of people released from Michigan prisons in 2003. The requested funds would cover the merging of administrative databases, coding of employment data from parole agent case notes for sampled records, and cleaning of other variables used in the analysis. Residential addresses will have already been geocoded for a related project, and data on socioeconomic characteristics of census tracts will be appended to parolee records. The proposed analysis would estimate, through multilevel hazard modeling and matching analysis, the effects of neighborhood context upon reentry on employment outcomes and recidivism, net of pre-incarceration neighborhood context and a host of individual-level factors. The proposal also includes plans for archiving the data and for disseminating the results of the research.

Funding Period: 09/01/2007 to 10/31/2008


PSC blog

Recent resources, events, news

New Publications

Bingenheimer & Geronimus, "Behavior & HIV"

Wildeman, "Imprisonment & Infant Mortality," PSC Research Report

Next Brown Bag

Mon, Nov 9
John Bound
Stratification in US Higher Education
For live stream
LINK HERE

W A R N I N G

If you are reading this, it may be that you are using rather old web browsing software that does not support modern international Web technology standards. For a better experience of the Web and this site in particular, please upgrade your web browser software today. The following are good choices: Firefox 2; Opera 9; Safari 3.