Criminal history and employment: an interdisciplinary literature synthesis

• Date: 17 June 2019
• Published date: 17 June 2019
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2018-0185
• Pages: 505-528
• Author: Jakari N. Griffith,Candalyn B. Rade,Kemi Salawu Anazodo
• Subject Matter: Hr & organizational behaviour,Employment law

Criminal history and employment:

an interdisciplinary

literature synthesis

Jakari N. Griffith

Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA

Candalyn B. Rade

Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, Pennsylvania, USA, and

Kemi Salawu Anazodo

Brock University, Saint Catharines, Canada

Abstract

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of research conducted over the past

ten years (2008–2018) that examines the relationship between criminal record and work in the USA.

Furthermore, a research agenda is presented that may help to better inform future investigations of the

relationships shared between these variables.

Design/methodology/approach –The authors review 58 peer-reviewed research articles identified in four

electronic article databases: Business Source Premier, PsycINFO, ProQuest Sociology Collection and

ProQuest Criminology Collection.

Findings –Of the 58 articles fitting the final inclusion criteria, 37 evaluated employee specific related

outcomes, whereas 24 took the perspective of the employer (including some overlap). Studies employed a

variety of methodologies and techniques, with qualitative interviews, archival data and audit methods as the

most prevalent. Few studies examined the relationships between criminal record and work in ways that

demonstrated improved employment outcomes for both employer and the employed together.

Originality/value –This is one of the first papers to synthesize interdisciplinary literature related to

criminal record and employment, including an assessment of the varying methodological treatments and

perspectives used in research studies to assess this relationship. The authors believe the findings from this

research effort will provide much needed research direction for investigators seeking to make contributions to

improving employment outcomes.

Keywords Criminal history, Employment barriers, Employment post-release, Employment re-entry

Paper type Literature review

Alarmed by an array of statistics suggesting widespread employment discrimination

against America ns with criminal re cords, advocate s ranging from nonprofits such as th e

National Employment Law Project (Rodriguez and Avery, 2016) to conservative

billionaires David and Charles Koch have argued that rejecting job ap plicants with

criminal records poses significant risk to an already vulnerable population and further

reduces an organization’s access to talented workers (Holden, 2016). Echoing this point,

sociological researchers Lundquist et al. (2018) have written that “employers may thus be

missing out on a large number of potentially high-quality workers”(p. 1061). Management

scholars Jones Young and Powell (2015) have called for more theory-driven research

approaches on ex-offender employment, noting that these applicants “continue to be

consistently perceived negatively and [thus] require additional attention in the literature”

(p. 308). The crux of the matter is what economists Kim and Loury (2018) describe as

the central feature characterizing the labor market for formerly incarcerated people:

employers have traditionally chosen not to associate with those who will presumably

return to crime.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 38 No. 5, 2019

pp. 505-528

© Emerald PublishingLimited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-10-2018-0185

Received 6 October 2018

Revised 6 February 2019

22 March 2019

Accepted 8 April 2019

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/2040-7149.htm

The authors thank Julia Watson for her research assistance on this project.

505

Criminal

history and

employment

To date, the recent proliferation of interdisciplinary scholarly and practitioner research

has focused disproportionately on the various ways that individual criminal

records produce unemployment. It has attended less to the larger contextual

and systemic factors that also contribute to unemployment for applicants with a

criminal record. In this paper, we refer to people with a criminal record as those with a

history of arrest, conviction, incarceration or other criminal history. While researchers

mostly agree on the major factors contributing to impoverished employment opportunities

following a person’s involvement with the criminal justice system (e.g. revocation of

professional licensures, gaps in employment history, substance use), far less is known

about the impact of criminal records in the context of employment seeking

(Baur et al., 2018). Indeed, Griffith and Jones Young (2017) speculated that employment

for those with a criminal record appears to be premised on a number of unspecified

psychosocial factors, which, if known, could help to stimulate further scholarly efforts on

the topic. Unfortunately, questions about these critical factors remain largely unanswered,

and the limited number of empirical studies on the subject makes it difficult to draw

conclusions on the current state of the literature. These problems are exacerbated

by different disciplinary treatments of the subject, which inhibit the advancement of

systematic investigations that may aid in identifying study variables capable of

improving employment outcomes.

Even though the connection between criminal record and employment outcomes is still in

its nascent stage, the recent uptick in scholarly activity across disciplines with management

implications (e.g. Ali et al., 2017; Rade et al., 2018) signals that additional guidance might be

required to help develop new theory and research paradigms (Weick, 1989) (Figure 1). Calls

for a systematic research agenda therefore are helpful for directing attention to the most

pressing unanswered questions in the field, particularly those from important practitioner

and academic concerns, such as: increasing public pressure to reduce recidivism through

targeted interventions aimed at improving employability (Anazodo and Jones Young, 2017);

and the assumed, but rarely tested, relationships between work outcomes, work experiences

and criminal record.

Noting the above, the purpose of this manuscript is to review the emerging literature on

criminal record and employment to clarify how it has been conceptualized and studied

across academic disciplines in the USA. More specifically, we extend the important work of

Ponnapalli et al. (2017) by synthesizing this interdisciplinary research and highlighting

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Figure 1.

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