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Working around the Law: Navigating Legal Barriers to Employment during Reentry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2019

Dallas Augustine
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Abstract

Employment has been cited as one of the most effective protections against recidivism for formerly incarcerated people; however, job seekers with criminal records face barriers to employment after prison. They find themselves in a legal double bind where they are simultaneously compelled to obey the law (by finding “legit” work) but also legally barred from doing so. To navigate this conflictual legal positioning, job seekers with felony records develop strategies of working around the law to find employment. Through thirty qualitative interviews with people with felony records, I examine this alternative form of legal consciousness and detail the ways in which individuals navigate the legal barriers to acquiring “good” work. Ultimately, job seekers’ often extralegal strategies of law abidance blur the line between compliance with and defiance of the law.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 726 - 751
Copyright
© 2019 American Bar Foundation 

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Footnotes

Her work, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, examines the intersection of punishment and the labor market, with particular attention paid to employment at reentry. She is a fellow of the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute and was recognized as the 2018 Emerging Scholar for the University of California Center at Sacramento. The author is grateful to Keramet Reiter and Naomi Sugie for their invaluable guidance throughout this project. Additional thanks to Noah Zatz, Alani Foxall, and Jasmine Montgomery for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. The research project that led to this article was approved by the University of California, Irvine Institutional Review Board and was supported by the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society.

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