Jim Bowery made a good suggestion in the last post that I display averages by race. Here is the mean number of offspring by race and lifetime number of arrests (inmates are between 45 and 54):
Mean number of children
White (n = 259)
One lifetime arrest 3.26
Two 2.87
Three 2.54
Four 2.72
Five 2.67
Ten 2.71
Black (n = 250)
One 2.74
Two 3.15
Three 3.08
Four 3.37
Five 2.55
Ten 3.71
Family size does not decrease with more arrests for either race. The correlation between number of offspring and number of arrests is -.02 for whites and .02 for blacks; in other words, there is no relationship. According to the MIDUS Study of non-criminal men aged 45 or over, the mean number of children is 2.62. Criminals have just as many, if not more, kids. (I'll look for prison inmate data--jail inmates have a lower average level of criminality.)
Data: The family size split between the religious and secularists has grown
A recent study of the Canadian General Social Survey shows an increasing split in the fertility of religious vs. non-religious women. From...
-
In the comments in the last post , some readers contended that Jews are not ethnocentric. Using the same question I used in the comments se... -
Via a reader at iSteve, it looks like this might be the vocabulary test used by the General Social Survey. (Someone please tell me if I'...
-
The National Couples Survey asked married people if they've had anal intercourse in the past four weeks. Here are their responses by ra...
Time spent in prison might be a more salient metric. A one-time murderer is probably going away longer than a multiple DUI offender.
ReplyDeleteI have no science to back this up, but I can tell you this from experience... inmates in jails and prisons have more kids than the system will ever know. Your numbers are skewed because of children not reported. I knew of one young man that was 22 years old that had 4 children and another 3 women pregnant with his babies. I would wager that the number is much higher for felons than the general population by a large margin. look at the number of women and children on state aid. Where do you think the fathers are... or have been?
ReplyDeleteIs it cheating to knock off the top (ten arrests) and bottom (0 arrest) samples?
ReplyDeleteIf not, then best fit for whites:
1 3.26
2 2.87
3 2.54
4 2.72
5 2.67
is 3.2*-1.3x with a coefficient of determination nearly .6; and for blacks:
1 2.74
2 3.15
3 3.08
4 3.37
5 2.55
the line is essentially 0 slope with a coefficient of determination of essentially 0 (0.006).
That 3.2*-1.3x should, of course, be 3.2-1.3x
ReplyDeleteDamn, I slipped a decimal place on the multiplier. Rather than -1.3 it should be -0.13:
ReplyDelete3.2-0.13x
Anyway, it does look like a plausible model for white fertility drops off significantly with the number of arrests, with 0 arrests being part of a different model.
What if a single arrest is just enough to make you into an "alpha" in the eyes of a significant number of females but not enough to subject you to the racially-biased sterilization effects of jail?