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Another powerful demographic force in the USA is the number of men who are ex-convicts: ""Few of us today are aware of the staggering size of this group. In a
by lkrubner 9y ago
Another powerful demographic force in the USA is the number of men who are ex-convicts:
""Few of us today are aware of the staggering size of this group. In a forthcoming study, Sarah Shannon, a sociologist at the University of Georgia, and five colleagues estimate that America’s criminal class (people with a felony conviction or prison time in their background) roughly quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 — from 5 million to nearly 20 million. Given the flow of sentencing since then, we might expect that population to have topped 23 million by now. And since roughly two and a half million people are behind bars today, this means that 20 million released felons and ex-prisoners are living outside institutions. This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony. And the ratio for prime-age men could be even higher, given the upsurge of sentencing in recent decades."
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/10/after-incarceration-how-and-male-labor.html http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/10/after-incar...
- jstanley 9y ago> This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony. That's an astounding statistic. I don't live in America, and I obviously don't run into a perfectly uniform sampling of society, but I'd guess way less than 1 in 8 people I meet have done something that deserves being thrown in prison.
- gilrain 9y agoNot that many people have done something that deserves being thrown in prison in the US, either. We're just far too happy to throw people in for things that don't deserve it, like non-violent drug offenses.
- gehwartzen 9y agoThe other issue is that many companies juts have blanket bans against hiring a 'felon'; doesn't matter if it was murdering a family or stealing a TV
- techiferous 9y ago> population to have topped 23 million by now Assuming an error rate of about 4%, this means that about 900,000 Americans have been wrongly convicted -- about the population of San Francisco.
- brewdad 9y agoDo you have a source for your 4% figure or is that just a gut feel estimate? I have no idea (as if anyone can definitively know) what the actual rate might be.
- techiferous 9y agoHere is a source: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/28/how-many-people-are-wrongly-convicted-researchers-do-the-math/ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/28/how-many-...