The Growth of Incarceration in the United States Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014) / Chapter Skim
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10 Consequences for Communities
10 Consequences for Communities
Pages 281-302
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From page 281... ...
At the most prosaic level, we use the term community here to denote the geographically defined neighborhood where the individuals sent to prison lived before their arrest and to which, in most cases, they will return after they are released from prison. Scholars have long been interested in the aggregate correlates and consequences of incarceration, but research has tended until quite recently to examine larger social units such as nations, states, and counties.
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From page 282... ...
Recent research has focused in particular on the dynamics of informal social control and the perceived legitimacy of the criminal justice system. We are also interested in whether the nearly 5-fold increase in per capita rates of incarceration, viewed from the perspective of affected communities, has had positive or negative effects on local neighborhoods.
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From page 283... ...
. To provide a visual perspective that captures the neighborhood concentration of incarceration and its social context by race and income, Figures 10-1 and 10-2 show an aerial view of two other cities, again very different from one another and located in different parts of the country; in this case, moreover, the cities also have very different levels of incarceration.1 Figure 10-1 shows the distribution of incarceration in the country's most populous city, New York City, which had an overall prison admission rate of 1 These maps were produced for the committee by Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center (http://wwwº.justicemapping.org/about-us/)
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From page 284... ...
Figure 10-2 shows that, while having much higher levels of incarceration than New York City, Houston has rates of removal to prison that are also highly uneven. Incarceration rates are highest in a sector extending south of downtown (e.g., Third Ward, South Union)
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From page 285... ...
CONSEQUENCES FOR COMMUNITIES 285 52% 4.8 19% 1.1 33% 93% 15% 57% Figure 10-1
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From page 286... ...
286 THE GROWTH OF INCARCERATION 52% 16.8 19% 32% 19% Figure 10-2
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From page 287... ...
These 32 super neighborhoods have the highest prison admission rates among the city's super neighborhoods and are labeled on the map according to rank from 1 to 32. They are collectively labeled "Highest (32)
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From page 288... ...
The second, very different hypothesis is that incarceration -- at least at high levels -- has a criminogenic, or positive, effect on crime independent of other social-ecological factors. According to this view, to the extent that high incarceration rates disrupt a community's stability, they weaken the forces of informal social control in ways that result in more crime.
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From page 289... ...
Incarceration at moderate levels could decrease crime while disrupting the social organization of communities and increasing crime at high levels. ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE Relatively few studies have directly assessed the coercive mobility hypothesis or the more traditional crime reduction hypothesis at the neighborhood level, and among existing studies the evidence is conflicting.
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From page 290... ...
focuses on the effects of incarceration not only on crime but also on the social organization of neighborhoods. They argue that high rates of incarceration, controlling for crime rates, undermine key social characteristics of neighborhoods, such as social networks, community cohesion, informal controls, and respect for the law -- in other words, legitimate systems of order and the political and social structure within a community.
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From page 291... ...
Drakulich and colleagues (2012) report that as the number of released inmates increases in census tracts, crime-inhibiting collective efficacy is reduced, although the authors indicate that this effect is largely indirect and is due to the turmoil created in a given neighborhood's labor and housing markets.4 We were surprised by the absence of research on the relationship between incarceration rates and direct indicators of a neighborhood's residential stability, such as population movement, household mobility, and length of residence in the community.
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From page 292... ...
The important questions on these topics -- such as whether incarceration reduces or increases community crime or informal social control -- are about social processes over time, which require longitudinal data to be thoroughly tested. Such neighborhood data have yet to be assembled across all the decades of the prison boom.
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From page 293... ...
Furthermore, crime tends to be highly correlated over time, and controlling for prior crime is one of the major strategies employed by researchers to adjust for omitted variable bias when attempting to estimate the independent effect of incarceration (see Chapter 9 for a discussion of omitted variable bias)
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From page 294... ...
solely to incarceration is problematic without explicit modeling of their independent effects. Specifically, if criminal justice processing prior to incarceration is causally important, the appropriate counterfactual in a test meant to assess the specific role of high rates of incarceration in a community's social fabric would be an equally high-crime community with high-arrest rates but low imprisonment.
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From page 295... ...
In both of these scenarios, the instrument has an effect on crime not operating through incarceration. Other studies have tried to use dependent variables thought to be decoupled from simultaneity or endogeneity, such as adult incarceration rates predicting juvenile delinquency as the outcome (unpublished paper described in Clear [2007, p. 171]
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From page 296... ...
As noted earlier, the coercive mobility hypothesis predicts that incarceration at low to moderate levels will reduce crime or imprisonment but at high levels will increase crime. Our examination of the evidence on this hypothesis revealed that nonlinear effects have not been systematically investigated in a sufficient number of studies or in ways that yield clear answers.
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From page 297... ...
. Additional Perspectives Although the confounding among community crime rates, incarceration rates, and multiple dimensions of inequality makes it difficult to draw causal inferences, this high degree of correlation is itself substantively meaningful.
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From page 298... ...
123) describes the consequences of this gender imbalance: "Men and women in neighborhoods where incarceration rates are high described this as both encouraging men to enter into relationships with multiple women, and encouraging women to enter into relationships with men who are already attached." It is not clear, however, whether gender imbalance can be attributed to incarceration as opposed to differentials in violence rates, mortality, or other social dynamics occurring in inner-city African American communities.
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From page 299... ...
California, for example, recently began a large-scale release of inmates under court order, providing an opportunity to study how the unexpected return of ex-prisoners to selected communities is causally linked to social conditions and crime rates. In the Boston area, mistaken and fraudulent work in a crime lab led to the voiding of hundreds of criminal convictions.
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From page 300... ...
. Neighborhoods can have turning points as well, allowing researchers to examine the aggregate deterrence and coercive mobility hypotheses in new ways, potentially building an understanding of how communities react when larger numbers of formerly incarcerated people live in them.
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From page 301... ...
In studies of communities, the effect of incarceration on crime cannot at present be estimated with precision. Specifically, unless researchers can locate high incarceration but socially advantaged communities with low arrest rates and low crime rates or low incarceration communities with high arrest and high crime rates and concentrated disadvantage, they will find it difficult or impossible to estimate the unique
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From page 302... ...
Indeed, durable patterns of inequality lead to the concentration in the same places, often over long periods of time, of multiple social ills such as exposure to violence, poverty, arrest, and incarceration -- especially in segregated African American communities. Thus, while legacies of social deprivation on a number of dimensions mean that the unique effect of incarceration is confounded and imprecisely estimated, perhaps the larger point is that the harshest criminal sanctions are being meted out disproportionately in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.
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