Employment

The shaded areas represent economic contractions.

The black line shows the civilians who are working as a percent of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population. (The civilian population excluding persons residing in institutions. Such institutions consist primarily of nursing homes, prisons, jails, mental hospitals, and juvenile correctional facilities.) Note that the black line has been clearly trending down in recent months.

People in jail are not considered unemployed nor are they considered to be part of the civilian workforce (and are therefore not included in the chart above). If you think of "doing time" as a job, it certainly has been a growth industry (growing much faster than the population).



I suppose the moral of the story is that if we were a nation made up entirely of criminals (shame on us), there would be no employment or unemployment. Go figure.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Civilian Employment
St. Louis Fed: Civilian Noninstitutional Population
St. Louis Fed: Civilian Labor Force
St. Louis Fed: Unemployed
U.S. Department of Justice: Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006

Note that the Civilian Noninstitutional Population data is not seasonally adjusted unlike the rest of the data. Also, a few of the series have a "break in the data" in January, 2000. I think it is good enough for my purposes here though.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced several revisions to the Household Survey on Friday Feb.7th 2003, with the release of the January 2003 Data. They introduced the Census 2000 population controls (which affect data back to 2000 and cause a break in the data in January 2000), a new seasonal adjustment procedure, and new seasonal factors back to January 1998.