A third of those claiming unemployment benefit have criminal records. Article here.
It is a startling statistic. It seems pretty obvious that those who are convicted will, especially if they have been in prison, be more likely to go onto unemployment benefit and will also find it more difficult to get a job. But there may well be another – albeit less significant – factor at work here, namely that unemployed people are more likely to turn to crime.
The whole thing is an example of how one social problem leads to another: more crime leads to more unemployment which leads to higher taxes which leads to still more unemployment (due to the tax ‘wedge’) which leads to more crime… and so on.