[lbo-talk] more Western

[Doug Henwood]

Just came across an Oct 2000 paper in ILLR by Bruce Western and Becky  
Pettit that recomputes employment/population ratios for men after  
adjusting for incarceration. If you include the imprisoned in the  
denominator, population (they're obviously excluded from the  
numerator, employed), the EPR for those aged 16-65 in 1996 goes down  
by about 1 percentage point for white men, and about 5 points for  
black men. For the 20-35 age group, the EPR would go down almost 2  
points for whites and 8 for blacks. For black high-school dropouts  
aged 20-35, the EPR goes from 46% to 29% (! - the average now is 63%  
- for men, 73%); for white HS dropouts in the same age group, it goes  
from 76% to 71%.

So if you apply the rough proportions in the pop of black and white  
men to the incarceration effect on the subgroups' EPR, the average  
EPR in August, 62.8%, would go down to about 62.3%. (White men are  
28% of the pop; black men, just under 4%.) That's something, but not  
a lot, and not enough to close the gap with France. The real story is  
how badly we treat black men, especially younger ones.

Doug