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In testimony today at 2:00 pm before the Joint Economic Committee, AEI demographics expert Nicholas Eberstadt will expose significant shortcomings and gaps in the collection of federal data. Eberstadt demonstrates that US statistical services are incapable of providing the basic facts and figures necessary to confront pressing social problems. He focuses on the monitoring of the country’s arrested and sentenced population, which he calls “an enormous blind spot and … a critical and inexplicable statistical oversight.”
Among his key points:
Generally, today’s employment situation for our country’s civilian, non-institutional, non-retirement-age men is still a Depression-scale problem. Our failure to cope with this problem is in part due to our failure to understand it—a failure directly related to the inadequacies of our statistical services.
Eberstadt focuses on the statistical gaps in data describing the country’s arrested and sentenced populations:
The US has seen an explosive surge in both arrests and felony sentencing for our adult population—
Age, sex, ethnicity, living arrangement, family situation, income, educational profile, health status, and all of the rest of the data the US federal statistical system collects for our national population cannot be cross-referenced by “arrest status.” Astonishing as this may sound,
Such fragmentary data as can be pieced together, however, hint that felons in the general population may pay a high long-term price for their crimes, even after they have paid their debt to society.
The population of arrested Americans and felonized Americans is on track to continue to grow for years to come—quite possible for decades to come.
To read the full testimony: America’s Invisible Felon Population: A Blind Spot in US National Statistics
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