Re: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
On Sep 9, 2007, at 3:23 PM, J. Tyler wrote:
I assume persons in prison don’t count, because they aren’t looking for work, and of course the people employed by prisons do count, and make up an ever-increasing
percentage of the workforce. So what would the unemployment rate be without this
huge trend upward in incarceration over the last four decades and has
anybody written about this?
The sociologist Bruce Western has.
Prisoners are not included in the unemployment counts (the universe
is the “civilian noninstitutional population,” and prisons, like
mental hospitals, are insitutional). The August unemployment rate of
4.6% is based on 7,097,000 unemployed out of a labor force of
152,891,000. (The labor force is comprised of the employed plus the
unemployed - and to be counted as unemployed, you have to be actively
looking for work.) If you assume all the 2 million behind bars would
be unemployed - and of course they wouldn’t be - then the
unemployment rate would rise to 5.9%. (Add 2m to both the unemployed
and the labor force and do the division.) If you assume half the
incarcerated would be unemployed, the jobless rate would be 5.2%.
Doug