Employment opportunities for ex-offenders: A field experiment on how type of crime and applicants’ ethnic background affect employment opportunities for low-educated men in the Netherlands

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Highlights

  • Little evidence was found for differences in the likelihood of receiving a positive response between applicants with or without a criminal record.

  • No difference was found for the likelihood of receiving a positive response between applicants with a conviction for the various types of offenses.

  • Ethnic minority applicants are significantly less likely to receive a positive response than ethnic majority applicants.

  • Ethnic minorities without a criminal record receive significantly fewer positive responses than majority applicants with a criminal record.

Abstract

Previous research shows mixed results for the effect of having a criminal record on applicants’ chances in the job market. We argue that, to make sense of this mixed pattern of results and better understand the impact of having a criminal record, research should examine under which conditions the effect of having a criminal record on job seekers’ chances is smaller or larger. The current study uses an experimental design to examine the potential role of different offense types and applicants’ ethnic background. Specifically, we ask how applicants’ chances of success are influenced by prior convictions for a violent offense, a property offense or a sexual offense and by their ethnic background. Data were collected using a field experiment in the Netherlands. Applications for 520 applicants were sent out in response to job vacancies published on the internet. The results provide little evidence that a prior conviction or the type of offense affects applicants’ chances of success. By contrast, we find a strong effect of applicants’ ethnic background. In fact, ethnic minority applicants without a criminal record are found to be less likely to receive a positive reaction than majority applicants with a conviction for a violent offense.

Introduction

For people with a criminal record, holding a job is highly important for the prevention of future offending. Various studies have shown that ex-offenders who find a job are indeed less likely to reoffend (Crutchfield & Pitchford, 1997; Mesters, Van der Geest, & Bijleveld, 2015; Sampson & Laub, 1993; Uggen, 2000; Van der Geest, Bijleveld, & Blokland, 2011; Wadsworth, 2006). Hence, if ex-offenders encounter problems while trying to find a job this can hinder their successful reintegration into society.

Prior research based on survey data has indicated that ex-offenders are less successful in the labor market than people without a criminal record (Bushway, Stoll, & Weiman, 2007). However, based on this research it remains unclear to what extent these findings are driven by spurious relationships or selection effects (c.f., Pager, 2003). Ex-offenders more often have a lower socio-economic status and lower educational level (Freeman, 1999; Lochner, 2004) and are less likely to possess a useful diploma, knowledge or skills (Uggen, 1999; Uggen, Wakefield, & Western, 2005) in comparison to non-offenders. Moreover, ethnic minorities have a higher risk of appearing in criminal justice statistics, although this is largely explained their lower average socio-economic status (Decker, Ortiz, Spohn, & Hedberg, 2015). Given that people with lower educational levels or socio-economic status and ethnic minorities have less favorable labor market prospects, it is possible that these features drive both their higher risk of involvement in crime and their lower chances in the labor market, rather than the latter two being causally linked (Pager, 2003).

The most suitable way to rule out selection effects and identify the causal effect of having1 a criminal record on one’s chances in the job market is to use a field experiment methodology (Pager, 2003). Field experiments regarding effects of having a criminal record on employment opportunities remain relatively scarce, but a number of prior studies have been conducted. In these experiments, fictitious job seekers with and without a criminal past applied for actual job openings, and employers’ responses to these applications were recorded. The vast majority of this research was conducted in the US (Agan & Starr, 2018; Decker et al., 2015; Galgano, 2009; Leasure & Stevens Andersen, 2017; Leasure, 2019; Mobasseri, 2019; Pager, 2003; 2007; Pager, Western, & Bonikowski, 2009; Pager, Western, & Sugie, 2009; Uggen, Vuolo, Lageson, Ruhland, & Whitham, 2014; Schwartz & Skolnick, 1962). Only a few field experiments were conducted outside of the US, namely in Belgium (Baert & Verhofstadt, 2015; Deliens, 1983), the Netherlands (Buikhuisen & Dijksterhuis, 1969; Dirkzwager, Blokland, Nannes, & Vroonland, 2015), Sweden (Ahmed & Lång, 2017) and New Zealand (Boshier & Johnson, 1974).

The results of these prior field experiments are remarkably mixed. The effect of having a criminal record on an applicant’s employment chances varies greatly between studies; some studies found a strong effect of having a criminal record (e.g., Decker et al., 2015; Deliens, 1983; Pager, 2003, 2007) whereas in other cases the observed effect was small (e.g., Baert & Verhofstadt, 2015; Boshier & Johnson, 1974; Galgano, 2009; Uggen et al., 2014) or statistically non-significant (e.g., Dirkzwager et al., 20152). Moreover, findings regarding the impact of having a criminal record vary considerably within prior field experiments; in several studies, an effect was found under some conditions whilst it was weaker or absent under other conditions (e.g., Ahmed & Lång, 2017; Baert & Verhofstadt, 2015; Boshier & Johnson, 1974; Decker et al., 2015; Galgano, 2009).

We argue that, to make sense of this mixed pattern of results and to better understand the impact of having a criminal record on people’s chances in the job market, research needs to move beyond the question whether having a criminal record has an effect and focus on uncovering under which conditions this effect is larger or smaller (or not observed at all). The present study forms a step in this direction. It builds on prior experiments in this field by examining the role of two factors that may influence the strength of the effect that a criminal record has on applicants’ chances of success: (1) the type of offense that applicants committed and (2) applicants’ ethnic backgrounds.

More specifically, this study contributes to existing insights in two important ways. First, there is a lack of experiments that derive and test hypotheses on how different types of offenses may have a different impact on job seekers’ chances in the labor market, even though some scholars in the field have pointed out that various types of offenses could affect job prospects in different ways (e.g., Uggen et al., 2014). Our study addresses this research gap by formulating and testing hypotheses about the influence of convictions for different offenses. Specifically, the first key contribution of the present study is that it distinguishes between three distinct types of offenses that were carefully chosen to this end. Second, more recent experiments in the US mostly included both ethnic or racial majority and minority job seekers with or without a criminal record. Several of these studies found that the negative impact of a having criminal record was stronger for minority than for majority job seekers (e.g. Pager, Western & Sugie, 2009). Yet, experiments conducted outside of the US focused virtually exclusively on majority job seekers. Hence, it is unclear whether these patterns are similar in non-US settings, and if variations in findings on the impact of a criminal record between prior studies in the US and those conducted elsewhere are driven partly by the racial or ethnic groups they cover. Against this background, a second key contribution of this study is that it incorporates both ethnic majority and minority job seekers with and without a criminal record to examine how having a criminal record and job applicants’ ethnic background shape their chances in the Dutch context.

In short, this study aims to improve our understanding of the conditions under which the effect of having a criminal record on job seekers’ chances in the labor market is smaller or larger, by addressing the following research questions:

How are job applicants’ chances of success in the Dutch labor market influenced by (1) prior convictions for different types of offenses – a violent offense, a property offense or a sexual offense – and (2) their ethnic background?

Section snippets

The role of different types of offenses

The vast majority of prior experiments in this field study the impact of having a criminal record using fictitious job seekers who did or did not commit one specific type of offense or who received one specific sentence or not. Which offense job seekers reported varies across studies. Therefore, this body of research combined covers a variety of offenses and sentences. Most experiments conducted in the US involved applicants reporting a conviction for drug possession (Decker et al., 2015;

Data collection

To test our hypotheses, we use data from an experiment in which fictitious individuals applied for job openings in the Dutch labor market. The type of offense committed and the ethnic background of the applicant were randomly varied across applications. The manipulation of the offense covered four conditions: the fictitious applicant could have committed a violent offense, a property offense, a sexual offense, or none at all. The applicant could also have an ethnic majority (native Dutch)

Type of offense

Applicants who reported no crime in their motivational letter received a positive response in nearly 20% of all cases (CI = 12.0–27.3). Applicants that did report a crime received a positive response in about 14% of the cases (CI = 11.1–16.4). This appears to provide some evidence in support of the notion that job applicants’ with a criminal past have lower chances of success than those without a criminal record. However, results of logistic regressions show that the difference is not

Conclusion and discussion

Having a job is one of the most important protective factors against delinquent behavior (e.g. Sampson & Laub, 1993). However, previous studies have shown that people with a criminal record often encounter difficulties when seeking work. In this study, a field experiment was performed to investigate whether the effect of a prior conviction on job applicants’ chances to receive a positive response to his application would vary depending on the type of offense and the applicant’s ethnic

reference

KNAW (2013).

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

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