Suburban Lockdown: Prison Proliferation and Segregation in Post-Civil Rights U.S.

• In Event: Geography of Incarceration

Abstract

This project explores the intersection of three phenomenon: the diversification of suburbia, the persistence of racial segregation, and the prison boom. Beginning in the late 1980s, there was a resurgence of social science scholarship on racial segregation. Sociologists emphasized its persistence as the “principal organizational feature” of American society. Around the same time, the U.S. reached the apogee of the prison construction boom: a new U.S. prison opened every 15 days. Interestingly, few studies directly explore the relationship between segregation and prison proliferation. In this paper, I ask: how does contemporary segregation compare across place, and does the presence of carceral institutions explain any of this variation? And within suburbs, how has prison location influenced segregation trends since 1980? Drawing on Census data, voting data, and geocoded data of state and federal prisons, I find that the U.S. “prison boom”, due to how the Census counts incarcerated people, affects conventional measures of segregation in ways that have been largely overlooked in existing research, an omission of increasing importance for the places most impacted by the prison boom at the end of the twentieth century. Results suggest that prison proliferation impacts broader residential location choices along racial lines in unexpected ways.

Author

• Angel Mendiola Ross, University of California, Berkeley