PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Johnson, Kecia R, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

Under the mentorship of Dr. Ruth Peterson, the primary objective of this postdoctoral fellowship is to shed light on the differential consequences of incarceration at both the individual and community levels of analysis. At the individual level, the focus is on whether or not incarceration influences labor market outcomes for different racial and ethnic group members across contexts that vary in levels of segregation and social disadvantage. The interest in the impact of incarceration on the community is twofold: 1) to understand how the distribution of incarceration affects community organization and structure and 2) to examine the consequences of incarceration for communities with different race/ethnic and class composition. The data selected for examining the consequences of incarceration at the individual level is the National Longitudinal Survey Youth 1979-1998 (NLSY). The basic modeling strategy will be to estimate three-level Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) where level one is a person-year, level two is the person and level three is the spatial context of labor market conditions, disadvantage and segregation. The data for examining the consequences of incarceration at the neighborhood level will be drawn from the Ohio offender database maintained by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections and a neighborhood crime database for census tracts in Ohio cities being assembled by Professors Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo. The modeling strategy will be to estimate Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regressions for predominantly black, predominantly white and mixed census tracts.