> If you assume half the incarcerated would be unemployed, the
> jobless rate would be 5.2%.
This whole discussion smells bad. The implication is that somehow the US is putting black men in prison instead of giving them jobs? And that this idea that if the US didn't put so many people in jail, there might be a Europe-style unemployment rate has to be refuted (roundly!) with, uh, facts is just loony.
The US has a lot of people in prison because the US has a lot of criminals, end of story. Yes, the so-called War On Drugs has exacted a toll, but if 1/3 of the prison population are in for "violent" crimes, what makes you think that up to half of who is in there probably "shouldn't be" ...? Isn't it already the case that, due to crowding, many of the sentences for violent convictions don't get served out? If you let ALL 2/3 of the non-violent (don't <i>some</i> non-violent criminals deserve to be in prison?) prisoners out, wouldn't you fill a bunch of those slots with violent offenders who got let out early?
I don't buy it. Yes, there's too many people in prison in the US. But if the US rate is 8x the rate in France, there's clearly something else at work: only looking at violent prisoners in the US vs ALL prisoners in France, the US would still have a ~3x rate of France. Incidently I think the reason we're closer to (but still beat) places like Russia, is because for all the other kinds of corruption in the US, the legal system is relatively less corrupt than some of those other places.
/jordan