The Electoral Consequences of Rural Prison Building

• In Event: Lightning Round: Research in Five: Graduate Students III

Abstract

Over the past five decades, prisons have quietly become a defining feature of rural America. Nearly 70% of the 2000-plus prisons in America are housed in rural towns. Considerable research has examined the economic effects of prisons in rural communities, but almost no research has considered the political ramifications. The current study asks, employs two different approaches to measuring the relationship between rural prison siting and political engagement. The first approach relies upon survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) and geocoded prison data to measure the correlative associations between rurality, prison siting, and voter turnout in presidential elections. The second approach employs longitudinal county-level turnout data and the same geocoded prison data to analyze over-time changes in rural towns before and after prison construction. In surprising contrast to the tenuous morality of mass prison building, preliminary analyses and suggest that building prisons in rural communities is associated with political mobilization. Further work is needed to determine the mechanisms behind this mobilizing effect. However, this paper argues in rural communities prison building is a politically mobilizing event because:
1) Rural prisons are often built in towns with high unemployment and limited economic prospects and prisons provide an obvious solution to this.
2) Prison building is a highly visible event, and the purported benefits are easy to understand.
3) The process of bidding for and constructing a prison in rural towns often involves large swaths of the community. Seeing the successful completion of such a massive project leads residents to view their political voice as being much more influential than thought previously.

Author

• Jacob Harris, Cornell University