[lbo-talk] more Western

Nick C. Woomer-Deters nwoomer at gmail.com
Sun Sep 9 19:33:37 PDT 2007


I dug up the article I was talking about. It was Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett: "How unregulated is the U.S. labor market? The penal system as a labor market institution," The American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1999.

I was wrong to use France as an example in my earlier post: France's unemployment rate beats the U.S.'s no matter how you cut it. _But_ when you adjust the U.S. unemployment rate to account for incarceration, many European economies have lower unemployment rates:

"According to the usual measure, the United States enjoyed consistently lower unemployment than Europe since the mid-1980s. However, with u" which counts a third of all inmates among the unemployed, less than a percentage point separates the United States and Europe for most of the 1976-94 period. If all inmates are included among the unemployed, u2, labor utilization in Europe is higher for 15 of the 19 years from 1976. Adjusted unemployment, u2, in the United States generally exceeds European figures, despite strong U.S. economic growth and job creation between 1985 and 1994. When taking account of incarceration, European unemployment significantly overtakes U.S. unemployment only from 1993"

According to Western's figures, in 1995 U.S. unemployment adjusted to include all inmates exceeded the similarly adjusted unemployment rates of Austria, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland.

-WD

On 9/9/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> 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
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list