Racial disparities in employment following adjudication for a serious offense

ABSTRACT

Prior research has highlighted persistent racial/ethnic disparities in employment and workforce engagement. That said, this research has yet to be extended to justice-involved youth. This is problematic, given that this is a population that may already face barriers to employment and certain racial/ethnic minority groups may then face additional barriers. This study sought to address this gap in the literature by examining whether or not racial/ethnic disparities in employment exist among justice-involved youth and whether these disparities vary across time since adjudication. The first seven waves of the Pathways to Desistance study were analyzed. Mixed effects modeling was used to examine whether or not racial/ethnic disparities in odds of past-year employment existed among justice-involved youth and whether these disparities were stable or variant across time. Results indicated that Black justice-involved youth reported lower odds of past-year employment compared to White and Latinx justice-involved youth. These disparities were also found to be stable across time. These results indicate that Black justice-involved youth should be a priority population for targeting with programming to improve employment prospects. Mentoring and skills development programs may be helpful in this regard.

Keywords:

• Employment
• Justice-Involved Youth
• Racial Disparities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A frequency measure of offending captured at each wave was examined instead of this binary measure in sensitivity analyses. Results were analogous to those in the main analyses.

2. Also, note that observation period length switched from six months to 12 months after participants had been involved with the study for 36 months.

3. Consideration was given to controlling for selection effects by including a binary variable delineating participants reporting college enrollment at waves three, five, and seven concurrent with the dependent variable measures. However, a large amount of missing data on this measure would have resulted in reducing the sample size considerably, so the choice was made to leave it out. That said, results that were estimated with this variable included in the model were robust to those of the main analyses.

4. In order to be sure that results were not biased by choosing one missing data management technique over another, multiple imputation was carried out with the data to conduct sensitivity analyses. Variables with missing data were regressed on variables with complete data for all participants (gender, race). Mixed effects modeling was then carried out for both of the models examined in the main analyses. Results indicated that the estimates for the main relationships of interest were generally analogous to those observed in the main analyses, indicating confidence in the robustness of the results of this study.

5. It was also suggested during the review process that lagged effects of control variables be omitted and contemporaneous effects be estimated instead. Both models were estimated again and results from the contemporaneous models were analogous to the findings observed in the main analyses. This indicates the robustness of the findings of this study.