The Punishment Ends & the Consequences Persist: Employment Challenges for The Formerly Incarcerated

Organizational scholars have shown interest in understanding how individuals with stigmatized identities navigate the labor market, in addition to the ways that organizations generate, perpetuate, and normalize inequalities in labor market opportunities. Nevertheless, such studies have predominantly focused on inequalities across race and gender. Nearly 600,000 adults reenter society from incarceration annually, yet 67 percent will be unable to secure employment in their first year at home. However, management journals have not adequately addressed the formerly incarcerated population's interaction with organizations, as well as their marginalization in the labor market. In the spirit of “Putting the Worker Front and Center,” we draw attention to formerly incarcerated workers and their ever-widening inequalities. We share research highlighting some of the difficulties this population faces: balancing the demands of post-incarceration community supervision, stigmatized identity disclosure at work, labor market socialization and sense-making, and barriers to entrepreneurship. This symposium has three goals: offer theoretical and practical implications about the work-related challenges faced by a marginalized and disadvantaged group of individuals, expand the current understanding of formerly incarcerated individuals’ challenges as they seek, gain, and persist in employment, and contribute to the literature on institutions’ and organizations’ roles and responsibilities in reducing inequality. The Punishment Ends & the Consequences Persist: Employment Challenges for The Formerly Incarcerated Author: Taryn D. Williams; UC Irvine Author: Jan Stephen Lodge; Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus U. Author: Wesley Helms; Brock U. Author: Audrey Holm; HEC Paris Author: Kylie Jiwon Hwang; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management