A New Deal for poor African-American and Native-American boys

The U.S. is facing a national crisis. It is virtually guaranteed that if you are poor, male, African-American or Native-American, you have a disproportionally high likelihood of ending up in prison, unemployed, or both. In a new paper by my colleague, Adam Looney, and his co-author, Nicholas Turner, intended to analyze post-incarceration employment, the authors find that:

“Almost one-third of all 30-year-old men who aren’t working are either in prison, in jail, or are former prisoners…Boys who grew up in families in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution were 20 times more likely to be in prison on a given day in their early 30s than children born in top ten percent of families…Prisoners are also disproportionately likely to have grown up in socially isolated and segregated neighborhoods with high rates of child poverty and in predominantly African-American or American Indian neighborhoods.”

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/03/14/a-new-deal-for-poor-african-american-and-native-american-boys/