A sobering new report in the New York Times reveals the disproportionate number of black men “missing” from their communities due to incarceration or early deaths. The Times found that black women between the ages of 25 to 54 who are not incarcerated outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million. Furthermore, about 900,000 fewer black men than women are alive today due to high mortality rates caused by homicide, heart disease, and respiratory disease—conditions that afflict black men more than any other demographic group.

Topping the list of places with the highest proportion of these “missing” black men was Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the racially charged police shooting of Michael Brown last November. As the authors of the article put it, “More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.”

The Times quoted Russell Sage Foundation author Becky Pettit (University of Texas-Austin), who stated, “The numbers are staggering.” Her book Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, published in 2012 by the Russell Sage Foundation, explores the extent to which mass incarceration has excluded scores of black men from national surveys, thereby concealing decades of racial inequality. As Pettit shows, because prison inmates are not included in most survey data, statistics that seem to indicate a narrowing black-white racial gap—on educational attainment, work force participation, and earnings—instead fail to capture persistent racial, economic, and social disadvantage among African Americans.

Following the release of Invisible Men, Pettit discussed in an interview with the Foundation the ways in which the exclusion of incarcerated African American men from data surveys has created an insidious “myth of black progress.” As she noted in one example,

In 2008, data from the Current Population Survey placed the high school dropout rate of young black men at 13.5 percent, evidence of a decline in the black-white gap in high school completion over the past few decades. Yet large urban school districts, which are disproportionately black, routinely report that 50 percent or more of their students drop out. What is going on? It turns out that if you include prison and jail inmates, the estimate of the nationwide high school dropout rate among young black men is actually 19 percent, 40 percent higher than conventional estimates suggest.

In other words, not only does the “disappearance” of over a million black men have serious ramifications for African American communities and families, but, as Invisible Men demonstrates, it deeply affects the data that shapes our national perceptions of racial progress.

Click here to read more about Invisible Men or purchase a copy of the book.

Click here to read the New York Times report in full.