As they enter adulthood, many young blacks, particularly males, have experienced unemployment and disconnection from schools and vocational institutions at rates ranging from 20 to 32 percent. By 2011, nearly two years after the Great Recession, more than one-quarter of young black males were neither employed nor enrolled in school or vocational training. The rates for white and Hispanic young people were also high in 2011, around 20 percent, but for black youth the rate has been about 10 percentage points higher throughout this period.
Black youth are also more likely to be confined in correctional facilities. Although the percentage of juvenile offenders under the age of 18 confined in a correctional facility declined from 1 percent to half that level between 1997 and 2011, they were still five times as likely to be in detention or correctional facilities in 2011 than their white peers. Today, blacks constitute nearly half of all people jailed and imprisoned in the U.S., but their rates of incarceration vary greatly by education level.
Among black young men who were behind bars in 2008, 37 percent were high school dropouts. For those with a high school diploma, that rate drops to 9 percent. Among those with some college, the rate falls to 2 percent, closer to that for young men from other racial backgrounds. Because of these incarceration rates, poor black children are more likely to experience a period when at least one of their parents is absent. Rates for black children with a parent behind bars more than tripled from 3 percent in 1980 to 11 percent in 2008.