Becky Pettit, author of
Invisible Men, discusses the growth of the prison population in the United States in recent decades. She describes the disproportional increase among certain ethnic and demographic groups and details the implications of this increase for interpreting social statistics. Most notably, since the
prison population isn't included in the main government surveys used by social scientists, data drawn from those surveys can be misleading indicators of what is actually happening among and within demographic groups. This is especially true for the
African-American population.
