Justin Fox, Columnist

Why the Incarceration Boom Happened

One segment of the working population benefits from convictions: prosecutors.

October 20, 2016 at 6:47 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Lock ’em up.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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In 1999, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was just 4.2 percent, compared with 8.6 percent in Germany and 11.3 percent in France. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the working-age population either with jobs or actively looking for them) was substantially higher in the U.S. than in those countries, too.

The standard explanation that economists offered for this disparity was that U.S. labor markets were less heavily regulated than those in Europe. As sociologists Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett summarized in the American Journal of Sociology in 1999: