Among young black men who've dropped out of high school it's over a third 37 my estimate suggests 37 percent are incarcerated at any given day. Among whites it's 12 percent right so I mean so so for white for young white men who don't finish high school which is the same as it is or a little higher than for young African American men broadly speaking and what that means.
Becky Pettit of the University of Washington and author of Invisible Men talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growth of the prison population in the United States in recent decades. Pettit describes the magnitude of the increase particularly among demographic groups. She then discusses the implications of this increase for interpreting social statistics. Because the prison population isn't included in the main government surveys used by social scientists, data drawn from those surveys can be misleading as to what is actually happening among demographic groups, particularly the African-American population.