On the move: Incarceration, race, and residential mobility

• This study examines the impact of incarceration on residential mobility.
• Fixed-effects regression models treat each individual as his/her own control over time.
• Likelihood of mobility goes up after prison, then declines across time.
• Formerly incarcerated African Americans most likely to move, but formerly incarcerated whites see greatest declines.

The present study examines the relationship between incarceration and post-prison residential mobility. In spite of recent research examining the residential context following incarceration, we know little about if or how incarceration affects individual patterns of residential mobility. This study starts to fill this gap in knowledge by drawing on nationally representative data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). I find that individuals with a history of incarceration are more likely to move after prison than they are before prison. This relationship holds even after accounting for various time-varying and time-stable sources of spuriousness, including other known correlates of mobility. Additional analyses suggest that this effect is strongest early in the reentry period, and that there exists important racial variation in the relationship between incarceration and mobility. These results imply that, while housing stability is an important feature of successful prisoner reentry, incarceration contributes to larger patterns of residential instability.