The Racialized Consequences of Jail Incarceration on Local Labor Markets

• Published date: 01 January 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/21533687221101209
• Author: Christopher Thomas
• Date: 01 January 2025
• Subject Matter: Articles

The Racialized Consequences

of Jail Incarceration on Local

Labor Markets

Christopher Thomas

1

Abstract

As a racialized labor market institution, the criminal justice system shapes racial pat-

terns in local labor markets through processes of exclusion and marginalization. How

do local county jails contribute to these dynamics? To examine that question, the rela-

tionship between county-level jail and employment rates is examined across the U.S.

between 2007 and 2017. The study uses a System Generalized Method of Moments

(GMM) dynamic panel model approach that structurally controls for simultaneous

determination and other sources of endogeneity. A racial stratif‌ication analysis iden-

tif‌ies a negative relationship between jail and employment in the urban counties with

the highest percentage of Black residents aged 15 to 64, whereas areas with the low-

est percentage of Black residents have a positive relationship between jail and employ-

ment. These racially differential spillover effects suggest that the impact of jail

incarceration on employment is signif‌icantly racialized at this level of analysis.

Keywords

race and corrections, prison-industrial complex, race and courts, bail, mass

incarceration, jails, race/ethnicity, African/Black Americans

Introduction

As a racialized labor market institution, the criminal justice system shapes racial patterns in

unemployment, labor market participation, job stability, earnings, and other labor outcomes,

1

Department of Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center, New York,

NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christopher Thomas, Department of Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate

Center, 524 West 59 Street, Suite 631 Haaren Hall, New York, NY 10019, USA.

Email: chrthomas@jjay.cuny.edu

Article

Race and Justice

2025, Vol. 15(1) 44-66

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

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DOI: 10.1177/21533687221101209

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through processes of exclusion and marginalization from the labor market (Smith & Broege,

2020; Smith & Simon, 2020; Warner et al., 2020; Zatz & Stoll, 2020). Scholars have argued

that the criminal justice system often functions to exclude Black communities, in particular,

from employment, especially employment in more desirable, stable jobs (Augustine, 2019;

Zatz, 2021). These patterns contribute to what Dawson (2016, p. 157) terms the “continued

systemic economic subordination of Black communities”(Zatz, 2020).

Multiple forms of criminal justice contact contribute to this race-specif‌ic labor market dis-

ruption in distinct ways. Arrests, for example, have been shown to lead to a smaller propor-

tion of weeks worked per year for Black individuals compared to their White counterparts

(Fernandes, 2020), while prison incarceration has been shown to have many racialized harms

on labor market outcomes both individually (Apel & Sweeten, 2010; DeWitt & Denver,

2020) and at more macro levels of analysis (Christian et al., 2006; Lopez-Aguado, 2016).

Some studies have included local jail incarceration in their analyses of racialized

labor market impacts, but they have often not disentangled jail from prison incarceration

(Kirk & Wakef‌ield, 2018). This persists despite jail incarceration affecting a much wider

swath of people per year than does prison incarceration, so the impact on communities,

especially communities of color, could be even broader than that of prison incarceration

(Turney & Conner, 2019). Jail incarceration is also distributed in starkly racially

unequal ways: in counties with the highest percent Black residents, both jail capacity

and jail admission rates for Black individuals are substantially higher than in other coun-

ties. In fact, urban Black men are eight times more likely than urban White men to expe-

rience jail incarceration by the age of 38 (Western et al., 2021). Thus, local jails are a

potentially impactful but under-examined racialized labor market institution.

This study f‌ills in this gap in the literature by examining the racialized consequences of

jail incarceration on local labor markets. Using national, county-level administrative data

from 2007 to 2017, the study applies a racial moderation analysis, stratifying U.S. counties

by the percentage of Black residents aged 15–64 each year, then deploying a System

Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) dynamic panel model to examine the relationship

between jail and employment in urban and non-urban counties with the highest percentage of

Black residents. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications and new research

questions opened up by this novel extension of the criminal justice, race, and labor markets

literature to an overlooked type of incarceration, an unexplored level of analysis, and a pow-

erful method of controlling for the endogeneity that plagues so much observational research.

Literature Review and Hypotheses

Three Theories Explaining the Racialized Effect of Jail on Employment

At the macro level, racial threat theories suggest that harsher jail incarceration would

be more likely in areas with larger proportions of people of color, because such demo-

graphic changes would be viewed as a threat to the political and economic inf‌luence of

the White population, prompting more severe social control of those perceived threats

(Durante, 2020; Duxbury, 2021). Some research testing racial threat theory has found

that high Black populations are associated with racial disparities in prison incarceration

Thomas 45