The Cost of Prison Facilities in California and New York

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A number of states have wrestled with in the economic downturn of the late 2000s is that they have very few state resources to devote to a whole range of things. There are a couple of ways to limit prison costs one is to limit the number of inmates and another is to limit services that they receive while they're incarcerated. The question I want to ask is given this growth, how do you keep up?

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.