Study Puts a $ on 'Collateral Costs' of Incarceration

What should it cost a person convicted of a crime? Time, lost behind bars? The respect of friends and family? Social standing? Should it be costly in terms of future earnings, and continue to affect a person long after their incarceration? Are we comfortable with that: transforming the phrase "paying your debt to society" from metaphor to literal fact?

Comfortable with it or not, that transformation has taken place.

In a new study, Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility, the Pew Center has quantified the costs facing someone who has been incarcerated -- and found that those costs are imposed long after sentences have been completed. (Read more after the jump.)

After release, former inmates make 40 percent less than they did before they were incarcerated. And lowered earnings are not a phase that former inmates pass through. Pew found that, “Of former inmates who were in the bottom of the earnings distribution in 1986, two-thirds remained there in 2006, twice the number of non-incarcerated men.”

That's troubling for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that many of the people behind bars are, or were, the primary bread winners for their families, meaning that the collateral economic costs of incarceration profoundly affect entire families. According to the study, “two-thirds of male inmates were employed and more than half were the primary source of financial support for their children.”

There are now 2.7 million children in the country with a parent behind bars. What the Pew study shows is that those children will not only be affected materially while their parent is locked up, they will likely be poorer than they would otherwise be for the remainder of their childhoods -- and that will impact their performance in school, and their futures.

It's not news that incarceration has effects that ripple far beyond the walls of the jail or prison a person was held within. Having a criminal record limits job possibilities, housing opportunities, even (in some cases) access to loans for school. But it is worthy of note that it is possible to track the effect incarceration has on the earning power of people who reenter society effectively, who find work and play by the rules.

According to the Pew study, incarceration will cost a former inmate (on average) 9 weeks of employment a year and $1.76 per hour in pay, for a total loss of $15,600 per year. That is not a negligible amount, and it's not something to look forward to as you leave prison.

What's the take home here? Not that there are collateral consequences to incarceration -- we knew that. The lesson here is that those costs are consequential and dangerous for society. We saw recently that contact with the criminal justice system pushes people out of democratic processes, and here we see that it shoves them out of the economy as well.

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