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