Chapter Summaries & Appendix
Introduction
The
introduction to the book lays out the main argument and contribution of Punishing Places. Mass incarceration impacted
communities with enormous social and political costs. Today, the highest rates
of incarceration are in nonmetropolitan areas and small cities. The research
literature has largely missed this fact: almost all studies of mass
incarceration and neighborhoods have drawn from data in large urban cities.
Theories of place and punishment thus emerged from a narrow understanding of
the ways place may pattern punishment. I also highlight that this intuition to
study places yields another important
finding: mass incarceration should be conceptualized as one of the legacies of
racial residential segregation. The introduction also explains why
Massachusetts is a useful case in addition to exploring U.S. counties.
Chapter 1 A Spatial View of Punishment
Chapter 1 describes major theoretical debates in analyzing the concentration of imprisonment in local communities. I present here the distinctive way that a spatial analysis of punishment deepens our understanding of the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. I discuss the two theoretical traditions that explain the highly spatially concentrated pattern of incarceration, and synthesize these theories to draw out key hypotheses about the relationship between place, social control, and racial inequality. These hypotheses are explored further in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2 The Urban Model
This chapter tests the urban model presented by scholars of social control and urban inequality. In an examination of prison admissions across Massachusetts, I find extreme spatial concentration of incarceration rates in neighborhoods: indeed, neighborhoods containing just 15 percent of the state’s population account for 51 percent of the prison admissions. However, contrary to prior research, I show the highest rates of incarceration are in neighborhoods of small cities outside of Boston. The chapter features a theoretical discussion of how these notably high levels and concentrations in small cities should be accounted for when developing theories of concentrated disadvantage or policies designed to ameliorate the impacts of mass incarceration on communities.
Chapter 3 Small Cities & Mass Incarceration
Chapter 3 charts the historical trends in imprisonment comparing urban, suburban, small/mid-sized, and rural places using city- and county-level data. The focus of this chapter are the small cities that have been understudied in the literature on imprisonment. The findings show that imprisonment has disaggregated spatially since the mid-1990s, and that large cities no longer account for the majority of imprisonment in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, a gradual decline in prison admissions began in the mid-1990s, but this happened in a spatially concentrated way: decline in Massachusetts imprisonment has been concentrated in Boston—the largest city in the state. To complement the study of state prison admissions, Chapter 3 also presents an analysis of U.S. counties explores these patterns in the four main regions of the country, examining jail population and prison admission data provided by the Vera Institute of Justice. The findings in U.S. counties show a similar trend: both in jail and prison populations, counties outside of large metros have eclipsed the rates in the large urban metros in recent years.
Chapter 4 Social Services Beyond the Big City
In Chapter 4, I share the stories and perspectives of social service providers working in small cities throughout the state of Massachusetts. Thus, I complement the quantitative analysis in prior chapters with qualitative data derived from 64 in-depth, semi-structured interviews. I present several mechanisms derived from these interviews. The social service providers describe struggling to help clients access basic services. They described the unique social context of small cities, and specifically spatial conditions of isolation and remoteness, social service needs and policy neglect, stigma, and trajectories of economic decline, all of which help explain the persistence of mass incarceration in these areas. These spatial conditions deepen disadvantage in employment and pose challenges to accessing housing and treatment among an already highly marginalized population.
Chapter 5 Race & Communities of Pervasive Incarceration
In Chapter 5, I revisit the role of race as an organizing principle for neighborhoods and mass incarceration. I examine the issue of racial disproportionality and disparity in neighborhood rates of imprisonment. I present the concept of pervasive incarceration to conceptually distinguish places of intense and widespread criminal justice contact. Examining racial disparity at different scales of geography, the chapter estimates racial disproportionality—the ratio of the percentage of people who were sent to prison and the percentage of people of a given race/ethnicity in a geographic area—for White, Black, and Latino people in both neighborhoods and in the sample of prison admissions to Massachusetts.
Chapter 6 Punishing Places
Chapter 6 explores three new ways to measure the impacts of imprisonment on places by explicitly reframing measures of community-level mass incarceration as normative concepts pertaining to excessive punishment, full membership in democratic society, and a broad notion of social welfare. I introduce excess incarceration as a way to conceptualize the presence of excessive state control in a given area, exploring excess under norms of either a “crime-warranted” perspective, and from an abolitionist perspective. Second, I present the concept of the community loss as a way to describe the total human costs of imprisonment using a measure of person-years sentenced to state prison, aggregated to the community level. Third, I present a framework of punishment vulnerability as a way to conceptualize imprisonment as a community-level hazard similar to environmentally hazardous conditions. This hazards framework does not pathologize the conditions of poor and disadvantaged communities, but asks more explicitly: what intersecting and cumulative conditions create punishment vulnerability, how do people survive these conditions, and how might these hazards be mitigated or eliminated?
Chapter 7 Beyond Punishing Places
I conclude the book with a summary of the book’s contributions to sociology and policy implications for criminal justice reform. In small cities where very little alternative strategies exist, formal social control continues to be the policy lever for responding to problems of addiction, poverty and joblessness. Policy reform could focus on areas beyond large cities to address the consequences of mass incarceration for communities, but that will not be enough to respond to the historic injustices brought about by mass incarceration. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how place-conscious reforms and initiatives could put an end to mass incarceration. I describe community-based models of justice that respond to the state-sponsored injustice of mass incarceration, and explore how abolition and reparative justice could restore the harms associated with mass incarceration.
Appendix
The Online Appendix provides details results reported in the book.