The Effect of Time Out of the Labor Force on the Dropout Rate

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As the labor economist to me from my old days as a labor economist when I was a little more was more narrowly focused one of the things that labor economists look at is time out of the labor force and its effect on your skill level. When people leave the labor force either voluntary or involuntarily and then you get arrested and you're spending a few years in jail so it's not so good for your way trade when you come out. Even if there was no stigma if you didn't have a problem explaining that you weren't working for three years or you were making license plates yeah whatever you could do before if you were in the labor market obviously has decreased and your skill set's kind of

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.