Prison-Based Education and Re-Entry into the Mainstream Labor Market

John Tyler and Jeffrey Kling

No 12114, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We estimate the post-release economic effects of participation in prison-based General Educational Development (GED) programs using a panel of earnings records and a rich set of individual information from administrative data in the state of Florida. Fixed effects estimates of the impact of participating in the GED education program show post-release quarterly earnings gains of about 15 percent for program participants relative to observationally similar non-participants. We also show, however, that these earnings gains accrue only to racial/ethnic minority offenders and any GED-related earnings gains for this group seem to fade in the third year after release from prison. Estimates comparing offenders who obtained a GED to those who participated in GED-related prison education programs but left prison without a GED show no systematic evidence of an independent impact of the credential itself on post-release quarterly earnings.

JEL-codes: J31 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published as Revised and published in "Barriers to Reentry? The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial America". Edited by Shawn Bushway, Michael Stoll, and David Weiman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2007, 227-256)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12114.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: PRISON-BASED EDUCATION AND RE-ENTRY INTO THE MAINSTREAM LABOR MARKET (2004)
Working Paper: Prison-Based Education and Re-Entry into the Mainstream Labor Market (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12114

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12114

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().