Why Surveys Should Pay Attention to Prisoners
Undocumented immigrants are hard to count because they often hesitate to answer strangers’ questions. Homeless people will be missed by landline phone surveys. Prisoners, by contrast, are literally a captive population for the purposes of survey research. And yet many major government polls exclude them entirely.
That has significant implications for evaluating the progress of black Americans, according to a book published this past week. The number of incarcerated Americans has grown far quicker than the general population, and today a large-enough portion of young black men are behind bars to skew findings by surveys that omit them, the author says.
Among the generally accepted ideas about African-American young-male progress over the last three decades that Becky Pettit, a University of Washington sociologist, questions in her book “Invisible Men”: that the high-school dropout rate has dropped precipitously; that employment rates for young high-school dropouts have stopped falling; and that the voter-turnout rate has gone up.
For example, without adjusting for prisoners, the high-school completion gap between white and black men has fallen by more than 50% since 1980, says Prof. Pettit. After adjusting, she says, the gap has barely closed and has been constant since the late 1980s. “Given the data available, I’m very confident that if we include inmates” in more surveys, “the trends are quite different than we would otherwise have known,” she says.