Housing Instability Following Incarceration and Conviction.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and a variety of modeling strategies, including sibling fixed effects and restricted comparison groups, this paper examines the housing stability of individuals with a felony conviction but no history of incarceration relative to those of formerly incarcerated individuals as a means of disentangling the effects of incarceration and community removal from the independent effect of felon status per se. Results indicate that, like formerly incarcerated individuals, never incarcerated individuals with felony convictions experience an elevated risk of housing instability and residential mobility, even after adjusting for financial resources and behavioral characteristics. As most previous research on the collateral consequences of the criminal justice system has focused on incarceration, this paper makes an important contribution to the literature by highlighting how conviction, not just incarceration, can introduce instability into the lives of the 12 million Americans with felony records who have never served a prison sentence. These findings suggest that criminal justice reform efforts focused on increasing the use of community corrections over incarceration may do less to reduce the harm of criminal justice contact than reformers expect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]