On Sep 9, 2007, at 10:33 PM, Nick C. Woomer-Deters wrote:
> 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.
Those are *male* unemployment rates only. And that rate - which Western and Beckett call u2 - assumes that all the incarcerated would be unemployed - but as the authors say, only 36% of inmates were unemployed at the time of their arrest. If you apply that result to the population behind bars, which they call the u1 rate, then the results are a lot less dramatic: only the Netherlands moves below the U.S.
Here's a table. The column labeled "all" is the OECD's standardized unemployment rate for 1995. The next three columns come from the Western/Beckett paper: the male unemployment rate, and their u1 and u2 rates. The last column shows the difference between the u1 rate and the male rate. This narrows the difference somewhat, but it really doesn't change the picture of the U.S. having a lower unemployment rate than the larger EU countries, or the euroland average.
all male u1 u2 u1-male Australia 8.2 Austria 3.9 3.3 3.3 3.5 0.0 Belgium 9.7 9.1 9.2 9.4 0.1 Canada 9.5 Denmark 6.8 6.2 6.3 6.4 0.1 EU-15 10.0 euroland 10.4 Finland 15.1 17.7 17.8 17.9 0.1 France 11.1 10.1 10.2 10.4 0.1 Germany 8.0 7.1 7.2 7.4 0.1 Ireland 12.3 12.3 12.3 12.5 0.0 Italy 11.2 9.5 9.6 9.8 0.1 Japan 3.1 Korea 2.1 N Zealand 6.3 Neth 6.6 5.9 6.0 6.1 0.1 Norway 5.4 5.3 5.3 5.5 0.0 Spain 18.4 Sweden 8.8 8.4 8.5 8.7 0.1 Switz 3.5 2.7 2.8 2.9 0.1 UK 8.5 10.1 10.2 10.4 0.1 US 5.6 5.6 6.2 7.5 0.6