Economics of Conviction

How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution

The unemployment rate in the U.S. would be higher if fewer people were incarcerated. By analyzing employment and prison data, this...

Locked Out of the Labor Market? State-Level Hidden Sentences and the Labor Market Outcomes...

States with more and harsher collateral consequences are more likely to negatively impact employment outcomes for people with criminal...

Incarceration and Stratification

Prisons generate and perpetuate social inequalities in various forms, including employment discrimination, health and education...

Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar...

Historians have not adequately assessed and analyzed the impact of post 1960 mass incarceration. Divided into three parts, the author...

Against Punishment: Centering Work, Wages, and Uneven Development in Mapping the Carceral State

In eastern Kentucky, prisons (like coal) serve as responses to the cycles and problems of capitalism, including deindustrialization,...

Exclusion and Extraction: Criminal Justice Contact and the Reallocation of Labor

The carceral state is a highly functioning labor market institution that both excludes people from the labor market and extracts labor....

“Still Doin' Time:” Clamoring for Work in the Day Labor Industry

The day-labor industry perpetuates socioeconomic inequities through its regulation of formerly incarcerated people, while positioning...

The Financial Cost of a Criminal Conviction: Context and Consequences

The use of Legal Financial Obligations (i.e., court fines and supervision fees to child support payments), further impedes the upward...

Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex-offender Employability Crisis

Illinois prisons function as labor-market institutions, designed - at least in part - to specifically exclude Black men from economic...

A "Labor History" of Mass Incarceration

In order to fully understand the costs of mass incarceration, research on the labor market effects of the carceral state must be truly...