[Texgreen] Falling wages fill prisons

[Roger Baker]

http://www.russellsage.org/publications/workingpapers/western1/document

Did Falling Wages Increase U.S.Imprisonment?

Abstract
This paper studies the effects of wages and employment on men's prison
admission rates in the United States from 1983 to 2001. Research on
the effects of the labor market on incarceration usually examines
national or state-level data, but our analysis studies prison
admission among black and white men in specific age-education groups.
We find a significant increase in educational inequality in
incarceration; nearly all the growth in the risk of imprisonment was
confined to noncollege men. Regression analysis of prison admission
rates shows the negative effects of wages and employment on black
men's incarceration, and the negative effects of wages on white men's
imprisonment. If 1980s wage and employment levels had persisted
through the late 1990s, the estimates suggest that prison admission
rates would be 15 to 25 percent lower for all non college men.
[snip]