NCJ Number
219939
Journal
Substance Use & Misuse Volume: 42 Issue: 7 Dated: 2007 Pages: 1187-1205
Date Published
2007
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This study examined the commonalities among a variety of employment measures with the purpose of identifying separate factors of employment in a sample of substance-using offenders; and to examine how these factors relate to substance use and criminal behavior.
Abstract
Findings suggest that employment status may be a better indicator of a reduction in drug use than other domains of employment with similar results found for a reduction in alcohol use. The authors recommend that employment measures should be made carefully and that a variety of employment measures should be used instead of a single indicator when examining the relationship between employment, substance use, and criminal behavior. Using employment measures from baseline interviews to factor employment status, income earnings, employment duration, and employment stability it was shown that these four measures had inconsistent patterns of correlations associated with substance use and criminal behavior. Participants were 500 clients (321 males and 173 females) who entered 1 of 2 Kentucky drug count programs between March 2002 and November 2002. Data were analyzed using work history profiles collected through measures developed at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine (Barrow et al., 1985); the demographics and substance use were adapted from the Addiction Severity Index (ASI; McLellan, Luborsky, Woody, and O’Brien, 1980); and criminal behavior was measured by 12 items adapted from Inciardi (1979). Tables, references