Prisoner Reentry and the Spread of Legal Cynicism

• In Event: Cultural Conflict, Legal Cynicism, and "Street Codes"

Abstract

More than 700,000 prisoners are released from incarceration each year in the United States, and most end up returning to urban areas, concentrated in resource-deprived neighborhoods. To the extent that convicted criminals are distrustful of the criminal justice system, the funneling of massive numbers of former prisoners back into select neighborhoods likely facilitates the reproduction of a cultural ethos of legal cynicism in those areas. In turn, neighborhoods characterized by legal cynicism are likely to incubate an environment more conducive to violence. To test these hypotheses, I combine data on the geographic distribution of returning prisoners in Chicago from the Illinois Department of Corrections with data on neighborhood characteristics from the U.S. Census, the Chicago Police Department, and the Chicago Community Adult Health Study. As I hypothesized, my findings reveal that a dense concentration of returning prisoners in a neighborhood facilitates the production of cynical views of the law in the neighborhood, and this relationship is mediated by concentrated disadvantage. Moreover, concentrated prisoner reentry is positively predictive of subsequent increases in neighborhood violence, and this relationship is mediated by legal cynicism.

Author

• David Kirk, University of Texas at Austin