On the Margins: Considering the Relationship between Informal Work and Reoffending

Abstract

Research suggests that job stability and job quality are vital in enhancing the crime suppression effects of employment. Unfortunately, with the erosion of the manufacturing economy and the increase in the service-dominated economy, offenders who are typically on the margins of society, are pushed towards the informal economy now more than before. The current study attends to the relationship between informal work and crime by analyzing data from the Pathways to Desistance study. Results from fixed effects linear probability models show that informal work is associated with a higher probability of engaging in expressive crimes, but not instrumental crimes. Neither informal nor formal work arrangements seem to work as crime suppressants, but informal arrangements appear more criminogenic.

Keywords:

• Informal work
• employment
• offending
• recidivism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tom Loughran, Jeremy Staff, Marvin Krohn, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There are various definitions of informal employment but according to the , informal employment is “all remunerative work both self-employment and wage employment that is not recognized, regulated, or protected by existing legal or regulatory frameworks and non-remunerative work undertaken in an income-producing enterprise.”

2 Sugie (2018) states that these men are foraging for work: “Foraging highlights the very uncertain, haphazard, and precarious nature of survival work among job seekers navigating the margins of the labor market.’’ (p. 1456).

3 Please refer to https://www.pathwaysstudy.pitt.edu/codebook/cal-living_calendar_codebook.html for explanation of survey.

4 A comparison between the analytic sample (n = 2208) and the observations that were excluded due to missing values (n = 393) reveals that the analytic sample had significantly more exposure time than the excluded observations (.86 vs .36).

5 At the individual level, 247 (24.58%) individuals reported participating in informal work at least once, with an average of 1.46 waves over the three waves.

6 Destroyed/damaged property; set fire; forced someone to have sex; killed someone; shot someone bullet hit; shot at someone no hit; beat up someone serious injury; in a fight; beat someone as part of gang; joyriding

7 Broke in to steal; shoplifted; bought/received/sold stolen property; used check/credit card illegally; stole car or motorcycle; sold marijuana; sold other drugs; been paid by someone for sex; took by force with a weapon; took by force without a weapon.

8 As a robustness check, we also separated earnings and weeks of informal work and formal work into terciles. Results are substantively the same.

9 Table A1 shows that the effect of working both types of employment is not distinguishable from the effect of informal work. Thus, informal work increases expressive crime comparably in the absence or presence of formal work.

10 We did find suggestive evidence for a lagged effect instead of a contemporaneous effect: those who engaged in informal work had a higher probability of engaging in economic crimes in the following year. This lends some support to the economic motivation explanation and is in line with Cantor and Land’s (1985) argument that criminal motivation is associated with a lagged effect of unemployment as it takes some time to exhaust other financial resources. This finding also corroborates with our descriptive results: while the weekly earnings from formal work and informal do not differ, over the entire year earnings from informal work were significantly lower. Unfortunately, we were only able to analyze three years of data.

11 A similar finding has been reported among ex-prisoners in the Netherlands, wherein informal work seemed a plausible explanation for the differences between self-report and official data sources (Ramakers, Nobbe, Nieuwbeerta, & Dirkzwager, 2017).

12 Some data sources separate formal and informal work and could be used to examine trends and replicate our findings (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, and Urban Institute’s Returning Home).

13 Indeed, an aggregated work measure that combined formal and informal work showed no significant relationship with overall crime and a marginal significant relationship with expressive crime (Table A1).

Additional information

Funding

This study was partly funded by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (451-17-020).

Notes on contributors

Holly Nguyen

Holly Nguyen is an Assistant professor of Sociology, Criminology, and Public Policy at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include employment and crime, rewards to offending, and illicit markets.

Takuma Kamada

Takuma Kamada is an assistant professor of Osaka School of International Public Policy at Osaka University. His research interests include criminology with a particular focus on causes and consequences of illegal markets, urban sociology, race, ethnicity and immigration, and social inequality.

Anke Ramakers

Anke Ramakers is an assistant professor of Criminology; at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include offender employment and consequences of imprisonment and social policies for crime and employment.