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Florian Voss's avatar

Hi Alex, I want to understand the paper and your data, but I have a bit of hard time. Can you help:

I could not find any source (other than Cato) confirming a 1221 per 100K incarcerated Americans, the estimates are rather around 580 per 100K (see: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html)

And the population estimate that you can derive from the 613 per 100K for illegal immigrants would lead to about 24 million, accounting for percentage of male incarcerated and estimates for percentage of age between 18 & 54 and gender mix of male 54 vs female 46. If you ask your favorite AI for the highest estimate of illegals in 2023 a number below 14 million pops up. And using that number instead gives you 1015 per 100K.

I also want to ask why there is no discussion at all about the illegal immigrant population size in the study?

What am I missing here? Note that I have zero agenda, I am just trying to make sense of the numbers presented. And I can't, and I also can't find good backup data that matches the study.

Also the study does a breakdown by race that shows even using its own numbers that hispanics illegals (sources I found estimate 75% of illegal immigrants) have a higher rate than Whites or Asian Americans.). Isn't it alarming that 75% of illegals have the third highest incarceration rate even the studies numbers, let alone if the assumption of illegal population size is to high?

Here is the math:

Total illegal immigrants incarcerated in 2023: 67,813

Percentage of incarcerated illegal immigrants who are male: 93.9% (from Table 5)

Incarceration rate for illegal immigrants: 613 per 100,000

Calculating the total number of illegal male immigrants incarcerated:

67,813 × 0.939 = 63,676 illegal male immigrants incarcerated

To estimate the total population of illegal male immigrants:

If 63,676 represents 613 per 100,000 of the male illegal immigrant population, then:

63,676 ÷ (613 ÷ 100,000) = 10,387,600.

54% vs 46% male vs female assumption leads to 19.2 million, 80% in the age group of 18 to 54 leads to a total estimate of 24 million illegals in the USA.

If instead you assume 14 million illegals that would leave 6.27 million males and with 63K incarcerated a rate of 1,015 per 100K.

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