The Impact of the Size of the Prison Population on Social Data

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There's been this massive increase in incarceration and while there's one in a hundred american adults is incarcerated. Those with low levels of education are more likely to be in prison or jail than our whites or Hispanics. The U.S. unemployment rate doesn't include the incarcerated population but it does when we look at other things such as crime, he says.

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.