Incarceration and Neighborhood Concentrated Disadvantage: Evidence from the NLSY79

Michael Massoglia, Pennsylvania State University
Glenn Firebaugh, Pennsylvania State University
Cody Warner, Pennsylvania State University

This study investigates whether ex-inmates tend to reside in worse neighborhoods – neighborhoods characterized by higher levels of concentrated disadvantage – after prison than they did before prison. While the harmful effect of incarceration on a range of individual outcomes has been established, we know little about how it affects the kind of neighborhood context to which ex-offenders return. This study merges census tract data with over 20 years of panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to investigate how incarceration shapes the residential conditions of ex-inmates. Using a two-step Heckman procedure to adjust for the fact that not every ex-inmate changes neighborhoods, we show that incarceration significantly raises the probability of living in a more disadvantaged neighborhood. However, because African Americans are more likely to reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods both before and after incarceration, downward residential mobility tends to be limited to whites.