Community Context and Mass Incarceration

The increase in incarceration rates from 1970 to 2010 in the United States has catalyzed research to better understand why individuals commit crimes and why they return back to prison after release (recidivate). There is clear evidence of a social concentration of incarceration among four axes: socioeconomic status, gender, age, and race. Incarceration disproportionately impacts particular segments of the general population. Those involved with the criminal justice system are overwhelmingly male, African American, younger adults, and high-school dropouts.

Emerging evidence substantiates a fifth axis of concentration: place. Apart from the social and demographic trends of incarceration, there is a certain geospatial concentration of incarceration. Multiple empirical studies have determined that the majority of state correctional populations come from a handful of communities. The purpose of this entry is to demonstrate why community matters when it comes to understanding mass incarceration and its collateral consequences. The vital role of community supports is described in the form of institutional resources, social bonds, and collective citizenship.

The focus on community context is part of a larger effort to rethink the root causes of mass incarceration and its collateral consequences. Community has often been left out of discussions on incarceration. Macrosystem analysis examines structural dynamics, such as sentencing policies, that address admissions and the length of stay in prison (considered to be the drivers of the prison population). Microsystem-level interventions focus on evidence-based strategies for addressing criminal behaviors, most typically upon release to community to prevent recidivism. Within an ecological framework, there is an urgent need to address a critical mesosystem-level factor: community.

Place matters. High-stakes, high-incarceration, and high-impact areas are rotating terms to reference localities where criminal justice responses to crime exist in concentrated levels. In some cities, these areas could be neighborhoods, while in others they might be zip codes, districts, or another geographical designation. High-stakes communities are the epicenter of state punishment outside of prisons. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2009, 2U times the number of people incarcerated were under community supervision (probation or parole) and concentrated in particular localities.

High-stakes communities are those with a high minority residential population, a low socioeconomic status, a high score on the hardship index, and, correspondingly, high levels of violence. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the temporal sequence and causal dynamics of incarceration and other hardship factors are not as straightforward as presumed. The common logic one might follow is the following: High-poverty and under-resourced communities struggle with crime and violence. Subsequently, a significant percentage of residents are in contact with the criminal justice system and end up in jail or prison. New findings indicate that in high-stakes communities, crime and incarceration can have reciprocal effects; there is a bidirectional relationship. In other words, crime produces incarceration, and incarceration produces more crime. As a result of this cyclical aspect, incarceration becomes a part of the ecological dynamic of crime in particular neighborhoods.

What are potential explanations that account for this dynamic? Within these communities, a significant portion of the population is in constant flux, in and out of the correctional system, a phenomenon described as prison migration or prison cycling. High residential mobility has a deleterious effect on community life. Mobility engenders isolation and a low degree of social integration, thus decreasing the likelihood of social cohesion and commitment to a particular locality. Prison migration is a particular form of residential mobility, in that it is forced (not voluntary) and cyclical (people are removed and then returned back to the same place).

Dina Rose and Todd Clear have defined this dynamic as coercive mobility. Forced removal of large numbers of individuals disrupts social ties and weakens social networks. Collective efficacy, or the ability to mobilize for a common good, is thus impaired. In turn, norms of order are weakened and less able to promote prosocial behaviors rather than criminality. Scholars have explored why crime and incarceration are concentrated in a discrete set of communities. Robert Sampson’s research into neighborhood crime patterns has revealed that variability in crime concentration is derived from the social and organizational qualities of those places. Additionally, high levels of incarceration exist in the same areas where there are high levels of crime as well as concentrated disadvantage.

In fact, highly disadvantaged communities experienced incarceration rates 3 times higher than other communities with similar crime rates. In other words, concentrated disadvantage potentially has a greater explanatory power for concentrated incarceration than crime rates. Similarly, the results confirm that concentrated incarceration increases concentrated disadvantage, which in turn predicts higher rates of incarceration.

In explorations related to the ways concentrated mass incarceration harms communities, researchers have found that the majority of correctional populations come from a handful of urban communities. Forcibly removing large segments of the population in particular communities creates a negative ripple effect. Concentrated mass incapacitation destroys social bonds, social networks, and the capacity of community residents to respond collectively to achieve a common good. As a result, concentrated disadvantage becomes more entrenched, and deviance flourishes.