Photo

In his opening statement, Bernie Sanders described joblessness among young minorities using numbers that, while not inaccurate, exaggerate those problems relative to more standard measurements.

“Today in America, we have more people in jail than any other country on earth,” Mr. Sanders said. “African-American youth unemployment is 51 percent. Hispanic youth unemployment is 36 percent. It seems to me that instead of building more jails, providing more incarceration, maybe, just maybe, we should be putting money into education and jobs for our kids.”

Those numbers are much higher than the standard minority youth unemployment numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In those numbers, the unemployment rate among 16- to 19-year-old African-Americans was 31.5 percent, and the rate was 18.6 percent among 16- to 19-year-old Hispanics.

Mr. Sanders’s campaign has said previously that he is using research from the Economic Policy Institute that uses a different, broader definition of unemployment that includes people with a part-time job who want full-time work and people who are not actively looking for a job because they think there are few opportunities. The E.P.I. data also uses a slightly different age bracket to calculate “youth unemployment” — from age 17 to 20 — and the data is limited to high school graduates.