IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lis/liswps/333.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Crime, Punishment and the Measurement of Poverty in the United States, 1979-1997

Author

Listed:
  • Kuan Xu
  • Ian Irvine

Abstract

The rate of incarceration has increased dramatically in the U.S. since 1980. We explore the implications of this increased incarceration on national poverty measurement using micro data for the period 19791997. We make use of an as-yet unexplored data set on prisoner earnings, in conjunction with the Current Population Survey to compute earnings of the whole population. It is found that the traditional measurement of poverty, which omits this increased share of the population that has become institutionalized, understates the true degree of poverty in the nineteen nineties to a significant degree. This underestimation has increased during the time period of study. Furthermore, it is the depth of poverty associated with the higher incarceration rate, rather than the higher rate of incarceration alone that has had the greatest impact upon poverty. These results stand in marked contrast to western European economies and Canada.

Suggested Citation

  • Kuan Xu & Ian Irvine, 2002. "Crime, Punishment and the Measurement of Poverty in the United States, 1979-1997," LIS Working papers 333, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    • Handle: RePEc:lis:liswps:333
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/333.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Edward L. Glaeser & Bruce Sacerdote & José A. Scheinkman, 1996. "Crime and Social Interactions," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(2), pages 507-548.
    2. James R. Hines & Hilary Hoynes & Alan B. Krueger, 2001. "Another Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats," Working Papers 833, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
    3. Robert K. Triest, 1998. "Has Poverty Gotten Worse?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 12(1), pages 97-114, Winter.
    4. George A. Akerlof, 2003. "Behavioral Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 47(1), pages 25-47, March.
    5. Dickens & David T. Ellwood, 2004. "Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work," NBER Chapters, in: Seeking a Premier Economy: The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980–2000, pages 313-370, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. George A. Akerlof & Rachel E. Kranton, 2000. "Economics and Identity," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(3), pages 715-753.
    7. Lambert, Peter J & Aronson, J Richard, 1993. "Inequality Decomposition Analysis and the Gini Coefficient Revisited," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 103(420), pages 1221-1227, September.
    8. Jeffrey Grogger, 1995. "The Effect of Arrests on the Employment and Earnings of Young Men," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(1), pages 51-71.
    9. Lars Osberg, 2000. "Poverty in Canada and the United States: measurement, trends, and implications," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 33(4), pages 847-877, November.
    10. Sen, Amartya K, 1976. "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(2), pages 219-231, March.
    11. Richard B. Freeman, 2001. "The Rising Tide Lifts...?," NBER Working Papers 8155, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Bishop, John A & Formby, John P & Zheng, Buhong, 1997. "Statistical Inference and the Sen Index of Poverty," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 38(2), pages 381-387, May.
    13. Lars Osberg & Kuan Xu, 2000. "International Comparisons of Poverty Intensity: Index Decomposition and Bootstrap Inference," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 35(1), pages 51-81.
    14. James Hines & Hilary Hoynes & Alan Krueger, 2001. "Another Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats," Working Papers 833, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
    15. Clark, Stephen & Hemming, Richard & Ulph, David, 1981. "On Indices for the Measurement of Poverty," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 91(362), pages 515-526, June.
    16. repec:bla:jecsur:v:11:y:1997:i:2:p:123-62 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. repec:fth:prinin:454 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Silber, Jacques, 1989. "Factor Components, Population Subgroups and the Computation of the Gini Index of Inequality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 71(1), pages 107-115, February.
    19. Jeffrey DeSimone, 1998. "Is Marijuana a Gateway Drug?," Eastern Economic Journal, Eastern Economic Association, vol. 24(2), pages 149-164, Spring.
    20. Kuan Xu & Lars Osberg, 2002. "The social welfare implications, decomposability, and geometry of the Sen family of poverty indices," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 35(1), pages 138-152, February.
    21. Kuziemko, Ilyana & Levitt, Steven D., 2004. "An empirical analysis of imprisoning drug offenders," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(9-10), pages 2043-2066, August.
    22. Dale W. Jorgenson, 1998. "Did We Lose the War on Poverty?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 12(1), pages 79-96, Winter.
    23. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1995. "Revisiting the Sen Poverty Index," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(5), pages 1225-1230, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kuan Xu, 2007. "U-Statistics and Their Asymptotic Results for Some Inequality and Poverty Measures," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(5), pages 567-577.
    2. Oihana Aristondo & Francisco J. Goerlich Gisbert & Casilda Lasso De La Vega, 2015. "A Proposal to Compare Consistently the Inequality Among the Poor," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 61(3), pages 561-572, September.
    3. Oihana Aristondo & José Luis García-Lapresta & Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira, 2011. "The Gini index,the dual decomposition of aggregation functions, and the consistent measurement of inequality," Working Papers 203, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    4. Wen-Hao Chen & Jean-Yves Duclos, 2011. "Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 44(3), pages 781-803, August.
    5. Picot, Garnett & Morissette, Rene & Myles, John, 2003. "Low-income Intensity During the 1990s: The Role of Economic Growth, Employment Earnings and Social Transfers," Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series 2003172e, Statistics Canada, Analytical Studies Branch.
    6. Jean–Yves Duclos & Phillipe Grégoire, 2002. "Absolute and Relative Deprivation and the Measurement of Poverty," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 48(4), pages 471-492, December.
    7. Makdissi, Paul & Groleau, Yves, 2002. "Que pouvons-nous apprendre des profils de pauvreté canadiens?," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 78(2), pages 257-286, Juin.
    8. Robert H. DeFina, 2002. "The impact of unemployment on alternative poverty measures," Working Papers 02-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    9. Garnett Picot & René Morissette & John Myles, 2003. "Low-Income Intensity During the 1990s: The Role of Economic Growth, Employment Earnings and Social Transfers," Canadian Public Policy, University of Toronto Press, vol. 29(s1), pages 15-40, January.
    10. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Deutsch, Joseph & Silber, Jacques, 2008. "On the Watts Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Decomposition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1067-1077, June.
    11. Oihana Aristondo & Casilda Lasso De La Vega & Ana Urrutia, 2010. "A New Multiplicative Decomposition For The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke Poverty Indices," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(3), pages 259-267, July.
    12. Davidson, Russell, 2009. "Reliable inference for the Gini index," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 150(1), pages 30-40, May.
    13. Marianne Bitler & Hilary Hoynes, 2016. "The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? The Safety Net and Poverty in the Great Recession," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 34(S1), pages 403-444.
    14. Kenya L. Covington, 2015. "Poverty Suburbanization: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Analyses," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 3(2), pages 71-90.
    15. Mussard, Stéphane & Pi Alperin, Maria Noel, 2011. "Poverty growth in Scandinavian countries: A Sen multi-decomposition," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 28(6), pages 2842-2853.
    16. Anderson, Gordon, 2012. "Boats and tides and "trickle down" theories: What economists presume about wellbeing when they employ stochastic process theory in modeling behavior," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 6, pages 1-44.
    17. Christopher Johnson, 2007. "A Re-count of Poverty in US Central Cities: Just Who and Where Are the Urban Poor?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 44(12), pages 2283-2303, November.
    18. Zheng, Buhong, 2000. "Minimum Distribution-Sensitivity, Poverty Aversion, and Poverty Orderings," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 95(1), pages 116-137, November.
    19. James E. Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) Poverty Measures: Twenty-Five Years Later," Working Papers 2010-14, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    20. Seth B. Carpenter & William M. Rodgers III, 2004. "The disparate labor market impacts of monetary policy," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(4), pages 813-830.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lis:liswps:333. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Piotr Paradowski (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lisprlu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.