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<\/a>Easthampton, MA<\/b> — Incarcerated people are disproportionately shut out of the economy even before they are locked up, demonstrates a new report<\/a> by the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative.<\/p>\n“I was shocked to discover late last year that the most commonly cited source for the fact that incarcerated people are poor was decades old,\u201d said Bernadette Rabuy, who recently published a report about the exploitative video visitation industry<\/a> that works to supplant traditional in-person family visits in jails with expensive $1\/minute video chats.<\/p>\n “All too often in criminal justice, the data we need doesn\u2019t exist, but here the data was hiding in plain sight. The federal government collects the pre-incarceration incomes of incarcerated people in a periodic survey, but this data wasn\u2019t being used,\u201d said Rabuy who partnered with data scientist Daniel Kopf to decode the data and put it into context.<\/p>\n The report includes the pre-incarceration incomes of incarcerated people by race, ethnicity, and gender and provides comparisons to the incomes of similarly aged non-incarcerated people. The report updates the most commonly used numbers for the incomes of incarcerated people and for the first time provides national data on the pre-incarceration incomes of incarcerated women.<\/p>\n