The Effect of Prison Closure on the Local Economy

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Prisons/ Prison-Related/ Experiences in Prisons

Abstract

A seminal carceral geography literature (Gilmore, 2007; Huling, 2002; Schept, 2022; Eason, 2017) documents the economic effects of prison siting and construction on the rural communities in which they primarily came to be housed. The fallout of a decades-long experiment with "carceral Keynesianism" is now well-established. How should these theoretical frames and methodologies be extended to meet the current era of "late" mass incarceration, in which prison closure increases in prevalence as an economic event? Engaging a causal inference theoretical approach and a difference-in-difference event study design, I ask: for the average U.S. locality with prison employment, what is the effect of a prison closure on the local economy? Poverty and unemployment are the main outcomes of interest. This study has implications for governments' approaches to ushering economically depressed exurban communities through economic transitions such as these. Centrally implicated is their successful or failed engagement of mitigation policy -- or "economic transformation policy", including infrastructure repurposing or other forms of planning -- to fulfill their responsibility to residents in facilitating the development of a post-prison economy. This study contributes more texture to the developing literature on the political economy of decarceration.

Author

• Eric Nathaniel Seligman, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities