Drug Policy and the Decline of the American City by Sam Staley

Author:Sam Staley [Staley, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781560007180
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1992-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Moreover, evidence collected by sociologists, discussed below, has found that many drug dealers view their employment as short-term and have left the “profession” by their mid- to late twenties. This behavior suggests that criminal activity still carries a social stigma (in the long run) that encourages participants to seek long-term employment in the legal sector.

If wage rates are sufficiently high in the extralegal market, labor will shift out of the legal market and into the extralegal sector. Declines in the supply of labor in the legal market will be reflected in lower labor force participation rates in official statistics. On the other hand, if the legal labor market remains competitive in wage and nonwage benefits, a legal market equilibrium could be maintained resulting in a labor shortage in the extralegal market.

The important implication of this approach for urban labor markets is that many teenagers do not leave the general labor force (only the official labor force). They are faced with a wide range of employment opportunities within as well as outside the legal system. The factor driving the model is the simple but plausible assumption that labor market participants engage in welfare maximizing behavior. Within the context of teenage youth, the apparent profits gleaned from extralegal employment, particularly the drug trade, are sufficiently high to compensate for the added risk of participating in illegal activity as well as for any additional moral objections.

Moreover, an active extralegal employment market suggests that labor force participation rates may significantly overestimate the degree of withdrawal from the labor force among teenagers, African-American teenagers in particular. To the extent that income statistics do not incorporate wages and profits made from extralegal employment, these statistics may be overstated as well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.