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ABSTRACT
Recently released prisoners in the United States are increasingly facing the burden of financial debt associated with correctional supervision, yet little research has pursued how—theoretically or empirically—the burden of debt might affect life after prison. To address this gap, we employ life course and strain perspectives and path analysis to examine the impact of child support debt on employment and recidivism, using longitudinal data from an evaluation of a prisoner reentry program known as the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative. Results indicate that having more debt has no effect on recidivism; however, more debt was significantly associated with a decrease in later legitimate employment. Implications for community reintegration and justice processing are discussed within the framework of past and emerging work on legal financial obligations, employment, and desistance from crime after prison.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the editorial office at The Sociological Quarterly and four anonymous reviewers for their careful assessments of our article. In addition, we would like to thank Ralph B. Taylor for his guidance and feedback on the analytical models. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology.
Funding
This work was supported by Award No. 2012-IJ-CX-0012, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice.
Notes
1. Eighty-one percent completed at least one follow-up. T-tests compared those who completed all interviews to those who did not and found no statistically significant differences between the two groups (p > .05) along many dimensions, including age, race, education, marital status, type of index offense, family instrumental support, employment status, SVORI treatment assignment, and the presence of a child support obligation. This pattern echoes SVORI researchers’ findings that at the follow-up waves, neither treatment nor comparison groups were statistically different on key characteristics from baseline (Lattimore et al. Citation2012).
2. We recognize the pros and cons of this strategy. While respondents who were reincarcerated were almost certainly rearrested, there could exist respondents who were rearrested but not reincarcerated. As such, we ran all analyses two ways: filling in reincarcerated as a proxy and with those respondents dropped. The model results were very similar; hence, we report on models using reincarceration to signify rearrest in cases missing rearrest information.
3. Due to concerns that this variable might be problematic for the rearrest outcome, models were also run with this variable omitted. Results were not substantively different.
4. We did not control for each state in the model. Adding dummy controls for each state created an “overparameterized” model with 77 new paths—11 states × 7 outcomes (one state would be the reference category) that would not converge (Tanaka Citation1987). As such, we were forced to exclude state controls from the final model but have included this variable to capture a degree of variation across states.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Nathan W. Link
Nathan W. Link is a doctoral candidate at Temple University. His areas of research are corrections, criminal justice policy, and criminological theory, and his recent work focuses on debt associated with criminal justice processing. His work is published in Justice Quarterly, Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Criminal Justice Policy Review, and Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. He can be reached at [email protected].
Caterina G. Roman
Caterina G. Roman is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University. Her interests include the social networks of at-risk and gang youth; prisoner reentry; gang violence; and the role of community organizations and institutions and other aspects of social capital in crime prevention and neighborhood well-being. She can be reached at [email protected].