State and local policies increasingly restrict employers' access to criminal records, but without addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks. Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant's criminal record later in the hiring process or...

Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers' costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation...

We analyze the extent and consequences of unequal representation on juries in Harris County, Texas. We first document that residents from predominantly white and high-income neighborhoods are substantially over-represented on juries. Using quasi-random variation in those called for jury duty...

Ban-the-box (BTB) laws are a widely used public policy rooted in employment law related to unnecessarily exclusionary hiring practices. BTB laws are intended to improve the employment opportunities of those with criminal backgrounds by giving them a fair chance during the hiring process. Prior...

A longstanding and influential view in U.S. correctional policy is that "nothing works" when it comes to rehabilitating incarcerated individuals. We revisit this hypothesis by studying an innovative law-enforcement-led program launched in the county jail of Flint, Michigan: Inmate Growth...

We investigate whether removing a previously-obtained criminal record improves employment outcomes. We estimate the causal impact of criminal record remediation laws that have been widely enacted with the goal of improving employment opportunities for millions of individuals with records. We...

This paper estimates teachers' impacts on their students' future criminal justice contact (CJC). Using a unique data set linking the universe of North Carolina public school data to administrative arrest records, we find a standard deviation of teacher effects on students' future arrests of 2.7...

Most of the 600,000 adults returning to the community from state and federal prisons annually in the U.S. carry substantial debt, have low income and low education, and limited formal employment prior to entering prison. Upon reentry, they face financial hardship, high rates of morbidity and...

We combine full-count Census data (1850-1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950-2020) to provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1850-2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants had higher incarceration rates than US-born white men before...