Persistence and Change in the Spatial Context of Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Recent Trends in Policing and Punishment

Abstract

Across mass incarceration’s 50-year history in the United States, jail and prison incarceration has largely concentrated in disadvantaged and segregated communities. However, recent research suggests that the spatial context of mass incarceration has shifted from high concentrations in urban areas in the 1980s and early 1990s, to small cities and rural counties outside the urban core in later decades. Merging county-level data on incarceration and policing with data on the social, economic, and political conditions of local areas, this paper uses cluster analysis to chart persistence and change in the patterns of incarceration rates and disparities across time and space, providing new typologies of place and punishment along mass incarceration’s five-decade legacy. The paper explores place-conscious policy responses to high incarceration rates that adapt to the emergence of new high incarceration areas, and historically persistent high incarceration places.

Author

• Jessica T. Simes, Boston University