UC Berkeley

This dissertation studies the intersection of labor economics, criminal justice, and discrimination. The goal throughout is to provide credible empirical evidence on the efficacy of important policies and the fundamental drivers of behaviors. The research combines tools from applied microeconomics that provide simple and transparent ways to understand patterns in data with more complex statistical techniques that dig deeper into the phenomena at hand.

Each chapter steps through a distinct piece of the typical course of individuals' interactions with the justice system. Chapter 1 begins at the end by studying the outcomes of individuals who have already been convicted and punished for their crimes. Chapter 2 steps back and examines some of most basic reasons why individuals first come into contact with the justice system to begin with. Chapter 3 examines the most common way offenders are actually punished once they do commit a crime, and how that system may drive racial disparities in the justice system and beyond.

Specifically, Chapter 1 analyzes the employment outcomes of ex-offenders. Individuals who have been arrested, convicted, or imprisoned fare substantially worse in the labor market than similarly educated peers. Many policy makers and analysts believe a crucial reason why is that employers are unwilling to hire job applicants with criminal histories, and have advocated for so-called ``ban the box" laws that prevent employers from examining criminal records during the early stages of the interview process. Do these laws help people with criminal records get jobs? Unfortunately not, Chapter 1 shows. Ex-offenders are only weakly attached to the labor force even before their first run-in with the law. After their first conviction, ex-offenders work less and sharply shift the industries where they do work. This suggests that ex-offenders largely work in jobs that do not view having a record as disqualifying. Since ban the box laws do not ultimately prevent employers from examining criminal histories, the law provides little motivation for ex-offenders to seek work in jobs that would not hire them anyways. More effective policies would likely either need to completely remove criminal records---perhaps through expunction---or address the fundamental reasons ex-offenders struggle in the labor market even before their criminal histories begin accumulating.

Chapter 2 turns to a more basic question: Why do individuals get involved with the criminal justice system to begin with? The chapter provides a comprehensive look at how the decision to engage in crime changes as individuals' personal circumstances shift in important ways. Using administrative data from Washing State, Maxim Massenkoff and I examine what happens to criminal offending around childbirth, marriage, and divorce for women and men. Our event study analysis suggests that pregnancy is a strong inducement for fathers and especially mothers to reduce criminal behavior. For mothers, criminal offending drops precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, stabilizing at half of pre-pregnancy levels three years after the birth. Men show a 25 percent decline beginning at the onset pregnancy; however, domestic violence arrests spike for fathers immediately after the birth. A design using stillbirths as counterfactuals suggests a causal role for children. In contrast, marriage marks the completion of a 50 percent decline in offending for both men and women. Finally, people headed for divorce show relative increases in crime following childbirth and marriage. The patterns in drug offenses for new mothers are consistent with a Beckerian model of habit formation.

Chapter 3 concludes by examining the effectiveness and equity of policies used to punish most convicted offenders. Most convicted offenders are sentenced to probation and allowed to return home. On probation, however, a technical rule violation such as not paying fees can result in incarceration. Rule violations account for more than 30% of all prison spells in many states and are significantly more common among black offenders. I test whether technical rules are effective tools for identifying likely reoffenders and deterring crime and examine their disparate racial impacts using administrative data from North Carolina. Analysis of a 2011 reform eliminating prison punishments for technical violations reveals that 40% of rule breakers would go on to commit crimes if their violations were ignored. The same reform also closed a 33\% black-white gap in incarceration rates without substantially increasing the black-white reoffending gap. These effects combined imply that technical rules target riskier probationers overall, but disproportionately affect low-risk black offenders. To justify black probationers' higher violation rate on efficiency grounds, their crimes must be roughly twice as socially costly as that of white probationers. Exploiting the repeat-spell nature of the North Carolina data, I estimate a semi-parametric competing risks model that allows me to distinguish the effects of particular types of technical rules from unobserved probationer heterogeneity. Rules related to the payment of fees and fines, which are common in many states, are ineffective in tagging likely reoffenders and drive differential impacts by race. These findings illustrate the potentially large influence of facially race-neutral policies on racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes.

Why should an economist be studying criminal justice? This dissertation, I hope, provides some answers. The decision to first engage in crime, and the decision to re-engage or desist later in life, is intricately connected to individuals' economic livelihoods. As in any other context, changes in stimuli and incentives matter. The tools of labor economics provide a unique opportunity to identify and measure the effects of these stimuli and incentives. Moreover, once we have built an understanding of why people behave the way they do, policy makers may wish to respond. Doing so almost always requires allocating a costly resource or making a potentially life-changing decision, such as sending a convicted offender to prison. Understanding the how to optimize these policies is crucial for building an environment in which all members of society have the opportunity to succeed.