Exacerbating inequality over the life-course: examining race differences in the reciprocal effects between incarceration and income.

This article examines how time spent incarcerated and income reciprocally influence each other over the life course for Black and White individuals in the United States, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Employing a multi-group lagged Latent Curve Model with Structured Residuals (LCM-SR) to adjust for confounding effects of prior income, the study finds that increased incarceration time significantly reduces subsequent income for Blacks—by approximately $300 to $600 per additional month incarcerated—while no consistent income reduction is observed for Whites. The analysis also reveals that Blacks experience longer and more stable periods of incarceration and lower income growth compared to Whites, suggesting that incarceration contributes to widening racial income disparities. These findings highlight the role of the criminal justice system in exacerbating economic inequality between Black and White populations in the U.S.