Punishment and Welfare: Paternal Incarceration and Families’ Receipt of Public Assistance

The US criminal justice and welfare systems together form important government interventions into the lives of the poor. This paper considers how imprisonment is related to welfare receipt for offenders and their families. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study, it investigates how recent paternal incarceration is associated with families' receipt of TANF, food stamps, and Medicaid/SCHIP. Results robust to multiple tests find that incarceration does not increase the likelihood of TANF receipt but significantly increases food stamps and Medicaid/SCHIP receipt. Further, the effect of incarceration on welfare receipt is larger than the recent loss of father's employment. The findings suggest that an unexpected consequence of mass imprisonment is the expansion of government regulation through welfare provision for offender's families.Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study, imprisonment, welfare, criminal justice, welfare system, food stamps, Medicaid/SCHIP, incarceration

Daytime Locations in Spatial Mismatch: Job Accessibility and Employment at Reentry From Prison.

Individuals recently released from prison confront many barriers to employment. One potential obstacle is spatial mismatch-the concentration of low-skilled, nonwhite job-seekers within central cities and the prevalence of relevant job opportunities in outlying areas. Prior research has found mixed results about the importance of residential place for reentry outcomes. In this article, we propose that residential location matters for finding work, but this largely static measure does not capture the range of geographic contexts that individuals inhabit throughout the day. We combine novel, real-time GPS information on daytime locations and self-reported employment collected from smartphones with sophisticated measures of job accessibility to test the relative importance of spatial mismatch based on residence and daytime locations. Our findings suggest that the ability of low-skilled, poor, and urban individuals to compensate for their residential deficits by traveling to job-rich areas is an overlooked and salient consideration in spatial mismatch perspectives

Utilizing Smartphones to Study Disadvantaged and Hard-to-Reach Groups

Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, offer social scientists a potentially powerful approach to examine the social world. They enable researchers to collect information that was previously unobservable or difficult to measure, expanding the realm of empirical investigation. For research that concerns resource-poor and hard-to-reach groups, smartphones may be particularly advantageous by lessening sample selection and attrition and by improving measurement quality of irregular and unstable experiences. At the same time, smartphones are nascent social science tools, particularly with less advantaged populations that may have different phone usage patterns and privacy concerns. Using findings from a smartphone study of men recently released from prison, this article discusses the strengths and challenges of smartphones as data collection tools among disadvantaged and hard-to-reach groups

CHILLING EFFECTS: The influence of partner incarceration on political participation

The prevalence of criminal justice involvement among low-income minority men has had many negative and often unforeseen consequences for ex-felons, their families, and their neighborhoods. One consequence felon disenfranchisement laws and low levels of political engagement among ex-felons more generally has measurably altered the outcomes of state and national elections. At the same time, studies in political science more generally provide strong empirical evidence that spouses and partners influence an individual‘s political behavior. Drawing on these two areas of research, this paper considers whether political disengagement among ex-felons has had negative consequences for the voting behavior and political engagement of partners. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey, the results find that partner incarceration is negatively associated with voting and political involvement. This association is entirely mediated by a partner‘s voting behaviors and his beliefs about his voting eligibility, regardless of state disenfranchisement laws. The political disengagement of not only ex-felons but also their partners has important implications for theories of social exclusion and the governance of marginalized groups. A large and growing population of the politically disengaged, economically marginal, and socially excluded likely has critical repercussions for US politics, democracy, and our social contract.disenfranchisement, voting, prison, minority men, families

Finding Work: A Smartphone Study of Job Searching, Social Contacts, and Wellbeing After Prison

The immediate months after prison are a critical transition period, which can determine future trajectories of successful reintegration or recidivism. Finding employment after prison is considered a key, if not the most important, condition to prevent recidivism; however, individuals face numerous obstacles to finding work. Although many of these barriers have been documented, methodological difficulties prevent a thorough understanding of how they impact the actual job searching and working experiences of individuals at reentry. Using an innovative data collection method--smartphones--this dissertation contributes a detailed portrait of the searching and working trajectories of 156 individuals. Participants were randomly sampled from a complete census of all recent releases to parole in Newark, New Jersey, and were followed for three months. Utilizing these novel data, the dissertation analyzes a) the searching and working experiences of individuals at reentry, b) the use of social contacts for finding employment, and c) the association between emotional wellbeing and job searching. The manuscript also includes a methodological chapter, which describes the strengths and potential challenges of using smartphones with hard-to-reach populations. Analyses of detailed smartphone measures reveal a reentry period characterized by very short-term, irregular, and poor-quality work. There is substantial heterogeneity across searching and working patterns, where older and less advantaged individuals sustain high levels of job searching throughout the three-month study period. In contrast to prevailing notions in reentry scholarship, individuals are not social isolates or deeply distraught about their job searches; rather, they are highly connected to others and feel happier while searching for work. These results indicate that the low employment rates of reentering individuals are not due to person-specific deficiencies of low social connectivity and poor emotional wellbeing. Reentering individuals, however, remain deeply disadvantaged in the labor market, where they compete for work within a structure of deteriorated opportunities for low-skill, urban, and minority jobseekers more generally. Relegated to the lowest rungs of the market, reentering individuals obtain jobs that are very sporadic and precarious. These findings challenge the established idea that finding suitable employment in today's labor market is an attainable goal for reentering individuals