Revisiting Coercive Mobility: Women’s Social Capital and Neighborhood Social Control

• In Event: The Effects of Incarceration on Children, Women, and Communities

Abstract

Previous work has shown that coercive mobility, referring to involuntary movement of residents due to prison admissions and returns, impedes neighborhood informal social control through the depletion of returning inmate’s social capital and gaps in network structure that their removal and subsequent reintroduction creates. However, those who remain in the community, overwhelmingly women in the presence of male friends, family members, and neighbors who have been incarcerated, also experience reductions in their own physical, human, and social capital due to collateral consequences and disruptions in their network structure. Women’s social capital serves as an additional mechanism for explaining how coercive mobility contributes to reduced informal social control. Drawing from literature on coercive mobility and the gendered collateral consequences of incarceration, I utilize data from the Effects of Arrests and Incarceration on Informal Social Control in Baltimore, Maryland to investigate the relationship of prison admissions and returns at the community level with women’s reports of social capital and informal social control, at the individual and community levels. Considering the degree of concentration of incarcerated men in large urban areas and the greater importance that women’s social capital has for informal social control, the gendered impact of coercive mobility requires more attention.

Author

• Jaclyn Marie Cwick, University of Missouri - St. Louis