Disability compounds employment woes for people with criminal records, and vice versa

Justice-impacted individuals with disabilities (JIID) are nearly 11 percentage points less likely to be employed than people with disabilities who have not interacted with the criminal justice system, according to a study out of Cornell's Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability.

The study, "Estimating the Intersecting Labor Market Disparities for Justice-Impacted Individuals with Disabilities: Evidence from Two United States National Data Sets," published April 15 in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, found a compounding disadvantage for people with disabilities and criminal records.

More than half of people who have been incarcerated in the U.S. have some sort of disability.

"We know that there are low employment rates for people with disabilities and low employment rates for people with criminal records, but due to the absence of a study that looks at that intersectionally, people assumed it was an additive thing," said co-author Matt Saleh, senior associate director of Cornell's Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative, housed within the ILR School's Labor and Employment Law Program.

People with prior justice interactions and people with disabilities already face employment rates below 50%.

"There is a lot of overlap between disability and criminal justice," said Jennifer Brooks, research associate at the Yang-Tan Institute, first author of the study.

Brooks and Saleh also found that gender played a role in JIID employment rates. Their findings indicate that JIID women have lower employment rates than their male counterparts and that the employment gap between JIID and non-JIID people with disabilities is wider for women than men. Their study found that white JIID females were 13.5% less likely to be employed than white females with disabilities without criminal records - the largest gap of all populations.

"As a group, justice-impacted individuals with disabilities have different employment rates depending on their gender and race, which reinforces the idea that within the population, there are different experiences," Brooks said. "So, when we go to make policies or make recommendations to employers or people who work with this population, it is clear that there is no one-size-fits-all model."

Julie Greco is the director of communications for the ILR School.