The decision to disclose: Employment after prison

Abstract

Despite awareness that a criminal record negatively affects employment prospects and that releasees are likely to internalize the stigma of their criminal history, the ramifications of such processes remains underresearched in the context of labor force participation after imprisonment. Building on past scholarship on disclosure, we examine how disclosure serves as a form of stigma management—thereby allowing people to exert some semblance of control over how they are viewed by others, particularly in light of new media technologies. Unique to our study is that we followed releasees (although there was attrition due to death, parole revocation, and recidivism) over three years. This opportunity provided insight into how releasees’ use of disclosure changed with experiences on the job market and over time as participants increasingly disassociated their current identity from their prison experiences and criminal history.

Keywords:

• Prison
• stigma
• employment
• criminal record
• reentry

Note

Notes

1 The educational profile of our sample is quite consistent with most recent available Canadian statistics (Boe, 2005). Seventy-five percent of our sample completed high school while in the institution. Boe (2005) found that 78% of all men in his sample of federal prisoners in Canada who had been admitted since April 1995 had not completed high school at the time of their institutional admission. Thus, our sample is fairly consistent with these trends, despite two outliers in our sample who possess university degrees.