Approximately 27 percent of formerly incarcerated people are looking for a job, but are still unemployed, a rate higher even than the general U.S. unemployment rate of 24.9 percent during the Great Depression, according to a new study by the Prison Policy Initiative.
According to PPI, the statistic is the first-ever national estimate of unemployment among formerly incarcerated Americans. Researchers used data for 2008—the most recent year for which data was available—to calculate the unemployment rate. People released from prison who were between the ages of 25 and 44 had an unemployment rate (27.3 percent) that was nearly five times the unemployment rate of their general public peers (5.8 percent) in 2008.
“Unemployment among this population is a matter of public will, policy, and practice, not differences in aspirations,” according to PPI.
[For more of this story, written by Taylor Walker, go to http://witnessla.com/new-data-...rmerly-incarcerated/]
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