Incarceration rates

In the news recently: Rand Paul and Cory Booker have hit the road promoting a complete overhaul of the laws which are doing so much damage to the black community. The NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research – where I once had a disastrous part-time job reworking a macro system!) has released a paper on research done by Derek Neal and Armin Rick of UChicago. This release is behind a paywall, but a detailed previous paper with similar results is here.

The WaPo’s WonkBlog has a piece which summarizes the results and has good charts:

The rise in the institutionalized population among black men without a high school diploma has been even more dramatic. By 2010, nearly a third of black, male high school dropouts aged 25-29 were imprisoned or otherwise institutionalized. This is higher than the employment rate for the same group, which was less than 25 percent.

The net effect of all this? “Prison spells harm the future labor market prospects of arrested offenders, and black men likely now face worse labor market prospects relative to white men than they faced when policy shifts in the late 1970s and early 1980s ignited the prison boom,” the authors write. Because this sharp rise in incarceration is a relatively new phenomenon, researchers are just now wrapping their heads around the implications for society-wide racial and economic equality.

The Drug War and resulting prison boom made California prison guards some of the highest-paid workers in the state. It has also been disastrous for young black men (and the community) and fed the gangs in Mexico and Central America, indirectly leading to the current child migration crisis. Using fear of crime, politicians have raised the army of DEA, police, and prison workers that keeps such a damaging policy in place years after crime has fallen to new lows. Free the people and end the DEA…

Semi-serious suggestions to bring back flogging contain the seeds of a real idea: punishment by long prison sentences does get criminals out of circulation, but it is costly to taxpayers and damaging to the community. Prisons become a school for criminals and money spent on them feeds a criminal underclass that survives through crime and prison support. More money for DEA, cops, prisons, and court proceedings handling all of that subsidizes a huge interest group that will resist any reform of the system.

Actual harm from drug use is far less than harm from the drug war, and most petty crime occurs because addicts need additional dollars outside the social welfare system to feed their habits at the artificially high prices for their drugs. Black-market profits feed gangs and turfwars that lead to most of the shootings in poor neighborhoods, and have fed gang violence in supplier countries as well. The machine feeds on taxpayer dollars and fear, and produces a dangerously fascistic understate that leads to SWAT teams’ deadly no-knock raids on the innocent.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More on Social Decay:

“Marriage Rate Lowest in a Century”
Making Divorce Hard to Strengthen Marriages?
The High Cost of Divorce
Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Cuba: Where All but the Connected are Poor
“Postcards from Venezuela”
Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture
“Income Inequality” Propaganda is Just Disguised Materialism
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Why Did Black Crime Syndicates Fail to Go Legit?
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education
Culture Wars: Peace Through Limited Government
Steven Pinker on Harvard and Meritocracy

“Breaking Bad”–The Lessons of Walter White