JOINT CENTER News Room
FOCUS Article Says Unemployment Rates Misleading
July 25, 2000
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - Recent low unemployment figures are misleading because of the continually rising rate of African American incarceration. In the June 2000 issue of FOCUS, economist George Cave asserts that the exclusion of prisoners from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' unemployment rates misconstrues the actual economic well-being of the modern African American male.
The author, a senior research associate at the Joint Center, concludes that the increasing rate of incarceration actually helped to produce the figure of the lowest unemployment rate for African American males in thirty years. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' standard method of enumeration overlooks imprisoned persons in counting unemployed persons and in measuring the size of the labor force.
The incarceration rate for African American men rose 40 percent between 1980 and 1985. One apparent reason for this increase is the disproportionately high arrest and conviction rates of black men in the enforcement of the "War on Drugs," which focuses on arrest and punishment rather than treatment.
Cave argues that after release, the social effects of incarceration tend to drive the unemployment rate higher in the black male population. Presently, the official U.S. unemployment rates do not demonstrate the social and economic destruction caused by incarceration. Only the onset of recession or declines in incarceration will fully demonstrate this emerging national catastrophe.
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