A newly issued Alaska State Legislature report held some grim findings about women living in the Last Frontier: They earn less than men, were imprisoned at a higher rate during the past 10 years, and have a suicide rate that’s twice the national average, among other problems, including homelessness and a lack of health care.I don't mean to make light of the genuine problems mentioned here, but I was really shocked to learn that women were imprisoned at a higher rate than men these last ten years. Given the relative rates at which men and women are imprisoned, that would not just be an outlier, it would be so shocking as to demand explanation.
So I delved a bit into the article and found the explanation, which is this bit from the fifth paragraph:
As for crime and imprisonment, the number of women going to prison in Alaska is growing: In 2007, women made up 6.5 percent of Alaska’s prison population, but that number had jumped to nearly 11 percent in 2011.Oh, I see. Not "at a higher rate than men," but at a higher rate than previously.
A friend of mine who teaches logic was telling me about how he hadn't had time to plan anything at all for his lecture, so he had winged it. The lecture was supposed to go for an hour, but he finished after 45 minutes. To the delight of the students, he said he was going to let them go early that day: "After all," he said, "we got through everything I'd planned, and I only expected to get through half of it."
What a bizarre article! I wonder whether they have an Official Oppressed Victims List?
ReplyDeleteI looked up national prison stats, and women are about 6.7% of the prison population. So 11% is considerably higher than the national average. There are 8 states where over 10% of the prison population is female. All were fairly poor states, but (perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not), the South had only one state in the list:
In eight states, at least 10% of
the sentenced state prison population was female, including
South Dakota, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia,
Wyoming, Alaska, and North Dakota
I wonder why that is?
You would achieve that result either if women are convicted for more crimes than is usual, or if men are convicted for fewer. That means it is likely that multiple factors are at work: You would expect at least two, one that explains why men might be less likely to commit crimes than usual (e.g., the economic boom for miners in North Dakota), but also another factor or set of factors that might explain why women might be more likely to commit crimes than usual (e.g., collapsing marriage rates in Appalachia combined with continuing economic depression there).
ReplyDeleteTexan99 goes over to Bad Data, Bad! a fair bit, where this sort of statistical sleight-of-hand is discussed with fair frequency. The blogger also mistrusts all infographics until proven honest.
ReplyDelete"The blogger also mistrusts all infographics until proven honest."
ReplyDeleteExcellent advice. Anyone who understands design knows that it is persuasive by nature, and infographics is essentially graphically designed graphs. I also distrust any graph that doesn't show zero.