Full Citation
Title: MONEY, EDUCATION AND INCARCERATION
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2012
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: People who are low income, ill-educated or unemployed are much more likely to be arrested and go to prison than more highly-educated affluent employed people (Western 2006). It is often assumed that the rise in incarceration over time tracked a rise in poverty, or that this strong individual-level difference will be found in aggregate comparisons across time or between places. This is not so, however. This paper examines the national trends over time and the comparisons between states. The time trends make it clear that imprisonment trends were uncorrelated with the cycles of poverty or unemployment, and the rise and (partial) fall in the imprisonment disparity was uncorrelated with changes in the disparity in poverty or unemployment. It is also often assumed that much of the racial difference in imprisonment is due to poverty or educational differences. This is also not true. The racial disparity in incarceration is not appreciably reduced when education is controlled. Table 1 shows the estimated probability of a man’s ever having been imprisoned in two national samples as presented by Western (2006) supplemented by the implied disparity ratios (which are calculated by dividing the Black percentage by the White percentage). As the table indicates, there are substantial educational disparity ratios within race: men who did not graduate high school are much more likely to have spent time in prison, and those who have been to college are much less likely to have spent time in prison. But there remain substantial racial disparities within educational groups. Further, most of the within-education racial disparities are larger than the within-race educational disparities, and the racial disparities are generally higher for more educated men. Turning this around, the educational disparities are lower for Blacks than Whites. That is, education made a bigger difference in the chances of going to prison for a White man than a Black man.1 This project uses aggregate-level data and does not control for individuals’ education. But there is no basis for believing that a control for education or poverty would reduce the salience of the race effect in aggregate data. Further, there are some surprising patterns across states. Consistent with previous research, economic factors have only weak relations with imprisonment trends. While, as we would expect, the rate of White imprisonment higher in states where White poverty was higher, the rate of Black imprisonment was actually lower in states where Black poverty was higher! The relationship is weak and appears to be driven by the low Black imprisonment rates of Southern states. At the state level, there is the expected positive relation between the Black/White disparity in poverty and the Black/White disparity in poverty. However, these state-level relations are not replicated when the unit of analysis is the metro area, where the main pattern is a zero or very weak correlation between economic factors and imprisonment.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Oliver, Pamela, E
Publisher: National Corrections Reporting Program
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Crime and Deviance, Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Poverty and Welfare
Countries: United States