Barriers to Prisoners’ Re-Entry into Formal and Informal Labour Market

Abstract

Aside from academics suggesting that low-physical-attractive prisoners may face difficulty reentering the labour market: permitting employers to access criminal history records aggravates the situation. The current study aims to alleviate this discrimination by generating more beauty premiums to prisoners through cosmetic surgery. The choice experiments (CEs) on hypothetical cosmetic surgery faces of 18 Thai male prisoners were conducted. In which every choice set, the respondents were required to make a tradeoff between beauty and criminal history records. The results show that cosmetic surgery generates beauty premiums to prisoners in both the formal and informal sectors with the odds ratio or increase of the utility of 1.75 and 1.754, respectively. Contrarily, the criminal history records result in discrimination to prisoners’ employments: decreasing job opportunities by 82.8% and 51% in the formal and informal sectors, respectively. The MWTP values show an additional salary to the cosmetic surgery groups for 2,600 baht approximately in both sectors. Besides contributing to the literature, the current study sheds light on the importance of physical appearance and criminal history records as one of the main barriers to prisoners’ re-entry. The findings could serve as new knowledge for policymakers to improve the success rate of prisoners’ reintegration.