The Geography of Mass Imprisonment in America

The Geography of Mass Imprisonment in America Presented by: Mrs. Simes Date: 1 November 2022 Introduction - 1 in 9 Men - 1 in 17 White men - 1 in 6 Latino men - 1 in 3 Black men Defining Mass Imprisonment - "... a rate of imprisonment... that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm for societies of this type... - [imprisonment] ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population." (Garland 2001, p. 1) Spatial Context of Imprisonment, defined: - The spatial processes and placed-based social contexts that produce places and neighborhoods with differential levels of imprisonment • Scale, diffusion, and clustering (spatial) • Concentrated disadvantage, rates of crime, and racial segregation (context) • Spatial concentration of the prior residences of incarcerated people (differential levels of imprisonment) Contextualizing Mass Imprisonment - Policing, court processing, and community supervision are organized by an intense pattern of geography - The spatial concentration of punishment, in turn, reproduces the conditions of racialized communities Main Arguments of Punishing Places - Mass imprisonment is a broad mode of governance affecting communities across the U.S. urban-rural continuum, and this is historically new - Mass imprisonment should be conceptualized as one of the legacies of racial residential segregation - An analysis of the community-level conditions points to broader understandings of the political and social costs of mass imprisonment Punishing Places: Overview of Key Findings - Broad spatial pattern affecting small cities and counties - Communities of pervasive punishment - Large social and political effects Outline - Background: Mass Imprisonment in Massachusetts - Theory - Data - Findings 1 - Findings 2 - Conclusion Imprisonment Ratios by Race/Ethnicity U.S. MA Black-White 5.1 7.5 Latino-White 1.4 4.3 - In all 50 states, MA has the highest Latino-White imprisonment ratio, and is in the top 10 for Black-White ratio. Race and Poverty in Context - William Julius Wilson (1987): • "Simple comparisons between poor whites and poor blacks would be confounded with the fact that poor whites reside in areas which are ecologically and economically very different from poor blacks." - Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo (2010): • “In this racialized reality, whites, African Americans, Latinos, and others are highly se-aggregated from one another in set- tings where social and economic circumstances are rarely comparable." Race and Punishment in Context - Research has mainly explained disparities in punishment as resulting from: • National or state-level policy • Racial bias and discrimination in individual decision-making Macro-Forces - Disparities follow from a long line of historical conditions of racial caste (Alexander 2010; Wacquant 2001) - Punitive policies, particularly the "War on Drugs," heaped the harshest penalties on most vulnerable populations (National Research Council 2014; Garland 2002) Individual Bias - Disparities follow from discrimination, bias and racism that emerge at the discretionary stages of criminal justice (Pager et al. 2009; Eberhardt et al. 2004) - Studies of racial bias in decisions made by line officers, prosecutors or sentencing judges often find little evidence of racial disparity, leading to the erroneous conclusion that racial bias is not a fundamental feature of the US criminal justice system (Gonzalez Van Cleve and Mayes 2015) - Intervention: • Incorporating spatial analysis of prior neighborhood environments provides greater insight into how racial disparities are both cumulative and contextual across the different stages of the criminal justice process Racial Inequality in Punishment - National or state-level policy ↓↑ - Spatial organization of residence and criminal justice activity ↓↑ - Racial bias and discrimination in individual decision-making - Racialization as a master mechanism (Bonilla-Silva 1997), producing racial segregation (Massey and Denton 1998) and a broad array of punitive racial projects aimed at marginalized communities (Omi and Winant 1986) Aggregate Disparities - A national focus obscures how a very small number of places contribute the lion's share of incarcerated population (Sharkey 2013; Sampson 2012) - Intervention: • Incorporating spatial analysis provides new insight into how criminal justice policies are enacted across and within communities, and into the severity of racial inequality that precedes arrest and conviction Communities of Pervasive Punishment, defined: - A community where incarceration has become a fundamental dynamic due to the extreme level of spatial concentration of prison admissions • Formalized as statistically significant spatial clustering of prison admissions at the tract level (Moran's I) Communities of Pervasive Punishment - Spatially organized criminal justice maps onto the racial-spatial divide of American communities - Neighborhoods with distinct ethnocracies compositions are vulnerable to the greatest surveillance and harshest treatment by criminal justice authorities Massachusetts Prison Intake Records - Last known street address of individuals admitted to Massachusetts state prison • Race/ethnicity, gender, age, marital status, legal status, offense type, sentence length - Counts aggregated to census tracts, cities, and counties - Prison admission cohort (2009-2017) - 21,816 prison admissions - ~ 6 prison admissions every day Neighborhood Data - American Community Survey 2005-2009 (5 year estimates) • Socio-economic disadvantage, racial and ethnic composition, residential instability, urbanicity - - Crime data: • FBI Uniform Crime Reports (Municipal-level, 86% coverage) • National Incident-Based Reporting System (Tract-level, 76% coverage) • Boston Police Department Records (Boston only) 1,459 census tracts • Scale of neighborhood (census tract) best for estimating the relationship between racial composition and crime in prior studies (Hipp 2007) Summary - On average and excepting outliers, White populations are never overrepresented in prison populations and Black populations are never underrepresented in prison admissions - 3 counties (out of 3,139) where White imprisonment is overrepresented in relation to White population by a factor of 2 or more - 80 counties where Latinos are imprisoned 2 times or more their population share - 1,208 counties where imprisonment among Black Americans is 2 times or more their population share