Improved Employment Reduces Crime: Evidence from the African American Experience and Implications for Australia

American prison populations have soared. In 1970, fewer than 200 000 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the United States. By 1996, more than a million people were incarcerated.2 The move toward increasingly punitive sanctions and the resulting increase of people in prisons was a conscious policy move in response to ambiguous evidence of the effectiveness of rehabilitation policies and of employment policies to curb criminal activities. Because policy makers believed that virtually nothing worked to arrest violence and economically motivated deviance, they turned to the one policy that made intuitive sense: incapacitation through imprisonment (Blumstein, Cohen & Nagin 1978, p. 314). Before other nations go down this path, however, it is useful to review the record of research evidence upon which American policy makers concluded that employment policies do not work to reduce crime. This evidence reveals considerable optimism about the prospects of curbing criminal behaviour through improved employment opportunities, especially for blacks who experience persistent employment barriers. Indeed, some of the less optimistic evidence arises out of empirical evidence that fails to distinguish between the criminal careers of blacks, who often turn to crime out of desperation arising from blocked labour market opportunities, and whites, whose criminal paths follow more varied routes. In this essay, I show that the economic model of crime and punishment provides the initial ambiguity about the policy impacts of employment on crime. In essence, the model and its variations suggest that the precise direction and magnitude of employment and wages on crime largely is an empirical issue. This conclusion spurred numerous empirical studies that appear on first glance to offer mixed results. What the literature shows, however, is that employment impacts hinge upon race issues: better wages reduce black crime but have only marginal impacts on white crime. 1Roy Wilkins Professor of Human Relations and Social Justice, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. This paper was originally presented 31 October 1997, at the Whyalla Roundtable Meeting at the University of South Australia, Whyalla, South Australia while the author was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Faculty of Aborigine and Islander Studies, University of South Australia. Comments and inspiration were provided by Rick Sarre, Colin Bourke, and other Roundtable conference participants. Much of the literature review discussed in this essay is based on the author’s National Institute of Justice (1980) monograph, Employment Opportunities and Crime. The U.S.-Australian Education Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation supported this research.