Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs

The official unemployment rate in the United States is 5.6 percent. Inflation stands at 2.8 percent. Both rates are low; added together they produce a rosier-looking unemployment/inflation number than the nation has seen for 27 years. Politicians will squabble over bragging rights.

But wait. That unemployment-rate number is misleading, says Richard B. Freeman, Ascherman professor of economics at Harvard and chief of labor studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The 5.6 percent figure does not include Americans behind bars-a multitude. The land of the free puts a greater percentage of its citizenry in jail than any other nation on earth. In the past two decades, says Freeman, we have roughly tripled the number of men incarcerated-to 1,350,500 by 1993. With a male work force of 69.6 million, that's one man inside for every 50 out, or 2 percent of the male work force incarcerated. Freeman estimates that only half of these men would find jobs if free. Since many of them will be free in time, a mass of men, mostly young, with little education, few skills, and poor prospects, is poised to become a drag on the economy. "We tend to think our labor market is better than it is because we're ignoring the people who are utter failures," says Freeman.

Labor markets in the United States and Western Europe are often compared, to America's advantage. Here, relatively few people are out of work, and, if unemployed, it's for a shorter time. There, many are unemployed long term and are on the dole. "The implication is that the U.S. has found an employment `solution' to the reduced demand for less-skilled male workers that avoids the cost of a large welfare state," Freeman told the American Economic Association in a paper presented in January. In fact, incarceration is part of the American solution. The cost of locking up so many men brings the United States significantly closer to Western Europe in expenditures on "troubled workers."

In a recent paper, Why Do So Many Young American Men Commit Crimes and What Might We Do About It?, Freeman writes of a carrot-and-stick policy to prevent crime. Society has a grip on the stick; the carrot is the problem. "How to improve the job market for less-skilled young American men, and reverse the huge decline in their earnings and employment opportunities," Freeman believes, "is the problem of our times, with implications both for crime and many other social ills."

Christopher Reed

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs