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The Price We Pay: Economic Costs of Barriers to Employment for Former Prisoners and People Convicted of Felonies (2016)

Bucknor, Cherries and Alan Barber. Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This report the estimates the impact of non-working felons on the employment rate and the cost to the annual GDP. Assuming a mid-range 12 percentage-point employment penalty for this population, this report finds that there was a 0.9 to 1.0 percentage-point reduction in the overall employment rate in 2014, equivalent to the loss of 1.7 to 1.9 million workers. In terms of the cost to the economy as a whole, this suggests a loss of about $78 to $87 billion in annual GDP.

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