Do Older Female Ex-Prisoners Participate in the Labour Market?

Abstract

We investigate labor force participation of female ex-offenders who served their first sentence late in life. We investigate whether ex-offenders’ labor market attachment differed before and after their imprisonment, and whether being employed helped them avoid or postpone recidivism. We contribute to the existing research on this topic by examining a very specific, yet disadvantaged group of workers in a longitudinal study using administrative data from all public employment offices in Poland for the period of 1 June 2004 to 31 December 2017. We find that while the older female ex-prisoners were indeed loosely attached to the labor market, being employed decreased their risk of a second imprisonment by 90%, and postponed recidivism. We also show that the multidimensionality of job quality matters, and that being attached to the labor force mattered most for ex-offenders with only one conviction, which should be taken into account in formulating social reintegration policies.

Keywords:

• Employment
• incarceration
• multi-state models
• recidivism
• recurrent event data models
• unemployment

JEL classification:

• C41
• C55
• I39
• J64
• J88

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is also the most common type of crime committed by men.

2 Occupations are categorised according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08); assigned to task content groups according to Acemoglu and Autor (2011); and adjusted to the Polish labour market by Hardy et al. (2018).

3 By a spell we understand the uninterrupted status of a given kind in the labour market with the given duration.

4 Thus, we left- and right-censored incomplete spells that finished before 1 June 2004 or ended after 31 December 2017.

5 If we excluded unemployment benefits from this specification, the impact of employment would become significant at the 10% significance level. The overall model specification remains significant at the 10% level as well.

Additional information

Funding

The present research was financially supported by National Science Centre Poland (project “Registered unemployment as a non-traditional route to non-participation of older workers. Recurrent event longitudinal data analysis” no. UMO-2018/30/E/HS4/00335).