Over the last two decades, the number of individuals incarcerated in prisons and jails in the United States has risen dramatically. As a result, over 700,000 prisoners are released each year. Incarceration is disproportionately experienced by young, low skill, African-American males, and has important consequences. For those seeking to understand the experiences of young adults from poor urban communities, the criminal justice system is arguably now as important as the education system or the labor market. Because incarceration separates individuals from social networks and interrupts schooling and employment, it has the potential to delay or preclude key life transitions for young adults, including school completion, first full-time employment, and leaving the childhood household.
This project investigates the role of two key social contexts - neighborhoods and households - in the transition to adulthood among formerly incarcerated young people. Our first goal is to investigate which formerly incarcerated young adults end up in more or less disadvantaged neighborhoods and households after their release from prison. We will focus on sociodemographic characteristics such as race and education as well as connections to social support as measured by time in prison and distance from home to prison. Our second goal is to examine the effects of neighborhood characteristics like unemployment and poverty and household characteristics like institutional housing on outcomes critical to the transition to adulthood, including employment, schooling, substance use, and further criminal justice system involvement. To accomplish these goals, we will collect and analyze new administrative data on a cohort of individuals age 18 to 25 released on parole from Michigan prisons in 2003 and followed through 2009.
Broader Impacts (A) Through a better understanding of neighborhoods and household contexts, we can begin to develop programs institutions that meet the developmental needs of young adults involved in the criminal justice system. We will write policy briefs that will communicate our findings to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. (B) This project will make a significant contribution to social science infrastructure by collecting new and unique data. We anticipate that our dataset, which we will be archived for use by other researchers, will be of interest to scholars in multiple disciplines. (C) We will work with and mentor students from underrepresented groups as research assistants, both undergraduate and graduate students, including women, African Americans, Latinos, and first-generation college students. (D) This project both capitalizes on and enhances a unique and productive partnership between university researchers and a state agency, the Michigan Department of Corrections. State agencies hold significant quantities of administrative data but rarely have the resources to put them to effective research use.
Motivation and Background: Over the last two decades, the number of individuals incarcerated in prisons and jails in the United States has risen dramatically. As a result, over 700,000 prisoners are released each year. Released prisoners are disadvantaged educationally, economically, and socially, and the prison boom has been linked to increasing inequality in the US. Incarceration is disproportionately experienced by young, low skill, African-American males, and has important consequences. For those seeking to understand the experiences of young adults from poor urban communities, the criminal justice system is arguably now as important as the education system or the labor market. Despite the magnitude of the increase in incarceration and the new scope of the criminal justice system, social scientists are only beginning to understand the consequences of these changes for the experiences of the young men and women whom they directly affect. The life course framework – which focuses on the role of salient life events in structuring developmental trajectories and life transitions – suggests that incarceration may be particularly consequential for those making the transition to adulthood. During this period, roughly age 18-25, critical life events typically occur, including school completion, first full-time employment, leaving the childhood household, and marriage and childbearing. Because incarceration separates individuals from social networks and interrupts schooling and employment, it has the potential to delay or preclude key life transitions and significantly alter trajectories. This project addresses the role of two critical social contexts, neighborhoods and households, in the transition to adulthood among former prisoners released from prison at age 18-25. Project Outcomes: We have assembled, coded, and cleaned administrative data on a random sample of 1383 individuals paroled from Michigan prisons to Michigan communities in 2003 and followed over the next 8 years. These data come from databases maintained by the Michigan Department of Corrections, the Michigan unemployment insurance system, the Michigan State Police, and the National Student Clearinghouse. The bulk of the data collection focused on coding parole agent narrative case notes for information about residences while subjects were on parole, including geocoding addresses and linking them to neighborhood characteristics and capturing information about the household and its residents. We also coded similar data on pre-prison residences. These data have been archived at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan for use by other researchers. Our preliminary findings are the following: Young adults leaving prison are a highly disadvantaged population. They have low levels of education, low rates of pre-prison employment, high rates of substance abuse and other forms of mental illness, experience high rates of homelessness and residential instability, have high rates of living in institutional housing, and live in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty and unemployment. Young adults leaving prison have significant histories of involvement in state systems, such as foster care and various parts of the criminal justice system. Young adults leaving prison are at significant risk for negative outcomes in the period following release, including drug and alcohol abuse, long-term unemployment, and continued involvement in the criminal justice system. Very few enroll in degree-granting postsecondary education following prison. Young adults leaving prison with more advantages (pre-prison employment, higher levels of education, more stable living arrangements before prison, less drug and alcohol abuse pre-prison) experience more advantaged social contexts after prison, including more stable living arrangements and neighborhoods with lower levels of poverty and unemployment, as well as better outcomes, including lower rates of unemployment, substance use and recidivism and higher rates of school enrollment. Neighborhood context is a significant predictor of employment, but the role of neighborhood context in recidivism is less straightforward, where the association between neighborhood and recidivism depends on the measures examined. We hope that the experience and payoff of large-scale collection of longitudinal administrative data, which is relatively rare in sociology, will help and encourage other sociologists to embark on this form of data collection. As this is one of the first large-scale studies of the transition to adulthood after prison, we hope that the results and further puzzles we uncover will spur future research on this population. Finally, this project has strengthened linkages between academic researchers and practitioners through the high-level of cooperation between the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Corrections that made this project possible. Such collaboration may serve as an example for future projects.
