criminology

Coercive mobility and the impact of prison-cycling on communities

Natasha A. Frost & Laura A. Gross

Published online: 31 March 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

At its core, this special issue of Crime, Law, and Social Change is about mass incarceration. The special issue focuses, however, not on documenting or condemn- ing the phenomenon of mass incarceration as it has proliferated across the United States, but rather on advancing our theoretical understanding of the role of incarcer- ation as an institution with the capacity to profoundly affect communities. The coercive mobility thesis, the theoretical idea at the core of each of the articles in this special issue, proposes that the process of removing people from communities to go to prison, and returning them from prisons to communities, should count as a form of mobility leading to sometimes profound social problems at the community level.

The emergence of mass incarceration

Historically the penalty of imprisonment was reserved for only the most recalcitrant offender and, as a result, the prison was an institution perhaps feared by many but experienced by few. Over the forty year period since the early 1970s, however, jurisdictions across the United States became more and more willing to impose (often lengthy) sentences of incarceration for wider classes of offenses and offenders, and incarceration came to occupy a relatively prominent place in our correctional reper- toire [1]. As a result, today, incarceration is an increasingly familiar experience for all too many Americans. You could almost hear the collective gasp when The Pew Center on the States issued a pair of reports in 2008 and 2009 documenting that 1 in 100 Americans were currently incarcerated and that 1 in 31 were under some form of correctional supervision [2, 3]. Although penologists had long known that incarcer- ation had become an institutional force to be reckoned with, this pair of reports made

Crime Law Soc Change (2012) 57:459–474 DOI 10.1007/s10611-012-9373-2

N. A. Frost (*) : L. A. Gross School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA e-mail: [email protected]

it all too clear to the everyday American that incarceration was no longer something that necessarily happened to other people. This was particularly true for those Americans living in the inner-cities from which incarceration draws most of its clients. With the arrival of the era of mass incarceration, the experience of incarcer- ation has become so common that incarceration is, in many ways, now part of our collective shared experience as Americans [4].

As of year-end 2010, over 7.1 million people in the United States were under some sort of criminal justice system supervision (probation, jail/prison, or out on parole) with over 1.5 million serving sentences in state or federal prisons, and an additional 750,000 serving time in local jails [5]. The statistics are staggering in their own right, but what is perhaps even more troubling is that 95% of the over 2 million people serving time in correctional institutions will eventually be released from those facilities [6], often having had very little by way of programming, treatment, or correction [7], and more often than not returned to either the very same (or similarly disadvantaged) communities that they were removed from to go to prison in the first place [8, 9]. In other words, we remove offenders from disadvantaged communities to send them to prisons, which for the most part are able to do very little with them while they are incarcerated, and then return those offenders to those same communities with the additional stigma and attendant consequences of having spent time in prison. Communities are expected to absorb the impacts of the process of removal and return of these offenders – a process referred to as prison cycling – often with few resources for doing so [10].

We offered this broad, and in many ways familiar, summary of mass incarceration to provide a context for thinking about coercive mobility. As will become apparent, the coercive mobility thesis in many ways relies on the existence of mass incarcer- ation. The thesis does not suggest that removing people from communities to go to prisons is necessarily a bad thing. The coercive mobility thesis suggests rather that when there are large numbers of people removed from the very same community, there might be reason to stop and consider the potential consequences of those removals to that community. In other words, the coercive mobility thesis is particu- larly relevant in the context of the concentrated incarceration that occurs more frequently when incarceration is used more liberally.

We turn now to describing the history and development of the coercive mobility thesis so that readers can read the empirical contributions that follow with a richer sense of the theoretical framework from which those studies emerged and through which they might best be understood. We outline the social ecological tradition that serves as the basis for community-level exami- nations of the effects of incarceration and explain how the coercive mobility thesis is situated within that theoretical perspective [11, 12]. We then discuss how the disproportionate distribution of incarceration within certain communities differ- entially affects minority populations. Like others before us, we believe that an appreciation for the differential impacts of incarceration is critical to influencing social policies to mitigate those deleterious effects [13–16]. We discuss the evolution of research into the social-ecological consequences of mass incarceration and con- clude by introducing the three empirical papers that constitute the remainder of the issue offering some thoughts on how each has contributed to expanding our under- standing of this increasingly important topic.

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Social ecology: understanding community destabilization

In order to place the coercive mobility thesis within a theoretical framework, it is important to discuss its theoretical heritage. Given space limitations, we can only scratch the surface of these rich theoretical traditions and encourage the reader to consult the original works cited throughout these sections. Research examining the social and ecological effects of incarceration on communities developed out of the social disorganization tradition in sociology. In their pioneering works, University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess and Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay were among the first to situate crime and delinquency within their ecological contexts [17]. At that time, the industrial revolution and waves of European immi- gration had created the new social habitat of the city – an environment whose dynamics and development influenced patterns of social interaction between people. In The City, Park and Burgess argued that patterns of social interaction within this new habitat had consequences for individual behavior laying the foundation for an ecological understanding of crime. Through observations of the physical consequen- ces of industrialization, of immigration, and of population mobility, Shaw and McKay connected the presence of low socio-economic status, a high degree of ethnic heterogeneity, and a high level of population mobility within a community to the condition of social disorganization. Shaw and McKay saw the formation of the city and the ecological ramifications of that formation as having far-reaching social consequences for that habitat including the break-down of the social contract, a lack of mutual trust and reliance among residents, an overall loss of the concept of community, and a decrease in the ability to control behavior through informal social control. Shaw and McKay then hypothesized that these ecological effects of social disorganization were conducive to elevated crime and delinquency. Through their own work, they were able to demonstrate that delinquency rates in areas of Cook County, Chicago that were characterized by social disorganization were much higher than in those that were not [17].

Although Shaw and McKay’s research was revolutionary at the time, unfortunately (due in part to the preeminence of social process theories) it did not receive much ongoing empirical attention until its revival in criminology in the 1990s. Two major contributions provide the foundation for the coercive mobility thesis and research into the social and ecological effects of mass incarceration: Robert Bursik and Harold Grasmick’s Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control [18] and Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush and Felton Earls’ Neighbor- hoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy [19]. Bursik and Grasmick elaborated on Shaw and McKay’s original model of social disorganization by conceptualizing community social control as consisting of three levels (private, parochial, and public) and hypothesizing that instability within (due to processes of mobility) and heterogeneity of (due to ethnic and socioeconomic composition) communities would affect all three levels of control, with elevated crime and delin- quency as the result [18]. Private control is the informal social control that occurs between significant socializing others, i.e. family members, close friends, spouses/ partners/significant others and functions to control individual behavior due to the affective attachment individuals have for one another more importantly, the desire to maintain that connection. Parochial control is a second form of informal social

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control in Bursik and Grasmick’s model and is understood as the informal community controls activated by community members through their interpersonal interactions on a day to day basis as well as by the presence of schools, churches, and local merchants, etc. that work to regulate the behavior of residents. Lastly, Bursik and Grasmick’s model also includes a conceptualization of formal social control in their third level of control: public control. Developed by connections between a commu- nity and outside agencies, public control represents a community’s ability to access and leverage connections and services from sources outside of their immediate neighborhood (often the state) in order to achieve collective goals.

Bursik and Grasmick argued that the condition of social disorganization negatively operates on all three levels of control in a community limiting the ability of that community to regulate behavior in both informal and formal ways with increases in the rate of criminal and delinquent behavior as the result. Particularly salient to coercive mobility and mass incarceration literature is the manner in which Bursik and Grasmick understood residential mobility as a driving force for community destabilization. According to their model, continuous changes to the residential population in communities decreases the ability of community members to foster and sustain strong private control ties. When this phenomenon is taken in the context of co-existing high levels of ethnic/cultural heterogeneity, the likelihood that paro- chial level controls will develop across diverse and varied such groups is also lessened. Communities characterized by social disorganization are lacking in mutual trust and systems of reciprocity. As a result, community members are less likely to have important, strong affective ties to significant others and also less likely to intervene in events that involve strangers in their communities. This assault on informal social control mechanisms further destabilizes a community through deplet- ing the mechanisms necessary for effective behavior control. Moreover, the lack of informal social control mechanisms results in an overreliance on the system of formal social control to regulate behavior, creating communities that have disproportionate contact with agents of formal social control such as police.

In the interest of theoretically advancing our understanding of the mechanisms by which indicators of social disorganization (low SES, high residential mobility, and ethnic heterogeneity) actually operate to affect individual behavior, Sampson, Rau- denbush and Earls introduced the concept of collective efficacy [19]. Building off of the concepts of informal social control and social cohesion discussed in Bursik and Grasmick’s first two levels of control (private and parochial), Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls demonstrated that collective efficacy (social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good) effectively mediates the relationship between indicators of social disorganization and violence. Sampson and his colleagues proposed that social stability and organi- zation lead to conforming behavior in neighborhoods, while a lack of community integration and stability lead to criminal behavior and delinquency. Social organiza- tion exists when there is internal cohesion, agreement on norms and values, and orderly interactions between residents. Conversely, according to the authors, social disorganization results when social cohesion and integration are disrupted and infor- mal social control becomes ineffective at regulating behavior.

Although these studies taken together represent the dominant theoretical frame- work within which research regarding coercive mobility and the effects of mass

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incarceration has situated itself, scholarship on the phenomenon of concentrated disadvantage lends important contextualizing information regarding the types of neighborhoods and communities that tend to be characterized by social disorganiza- tion. The concentrated disadvantage research goes beyond the original three indica- tors of social disorganization (SES, heterogeneity, and mobility) to explain how various social, political, economic and criminal justice policies and practices have interacted to create communities that are not just social disorganized, but that have also suffered disadvantages across multiple domains. The cumulative disadvantage that some communities experience cripples the community’s ability to effectively manage the behavior of residents.

William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street, and more recently Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader For A Day have each ethnographically examined how the trends in the United States over the past four decades of deindustrialization (especially in terms of urban factory systems), of large scale unemployment in unskilled labor markets, of social disorganization, and of the drug trade have resulted in a particular form of racially concentrated urban poverty [20–22]. In its own way, each demonstrates that urban poverty is an overwhelmingly African American experience and is one that is perpetuated through the process of social isolation. Not unlike Bursik and Grasmick’s explanation of what happens when parochial- level controls break down in a community, Wilson argues that in neighborhoods that are characterized by high levels of concentrated disadvantage social systems tend to be redundant; if your community ties are all to other similarly situated individuals (who also live in urban poverty and concentrated disadvantage) then those connections further alienate the community and its members from accessing outside resources [20]. According to Wilson, in areas of urban poverty there are few jobholders and middle-class institutions are noticeably absent. Poor blacks tend to live among other poor people and residential segregation by race and by economic circumstance effectively relegates this population to neighborhoods with crumbling social infrastructure [23]. Moreover, upper- and middle-class flight from these neighborhoods has removed all social buffers that would exist to ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty, leaving behind an entire population with little to no prospects in terms of employability.

Unfortunately, concentrated urban poverty is only one aspect of concentrated disadvantage. As Anderson and Venkatesh observed in their ethnographies of West Philadelphia and the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago respectively, many other social factors such as the paucity (and near absence) of male role models, deplorable housing conditions, dominance of negotiations for respect through violence and fear (e.g. the ‘code of the street’), and rampant substance abuse all contribute to the destabilization of the mechanisms of informal social control in communities charac- terized by concentrated disadvantage. Additionally, these communities are populated by individuals who, due to lack of opportunity, possess little human capital (limited educational attainment, limited employability due to lack of vocational training), and little self-efficacy as a result [16]. The limited human capital of individuals, the conditions of social disorganization that contribute to decreased social cohesion, and an inability to regulate behavior on a parochial level results in decreased social capital in these communities as well. Consequently, networks of weak ties that often yield employment or social services connections for individuals who do have higher levels of human and social capital are infrequent [24], and more typically social

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networks consist of strong ties that are redundant in the resources they can provide. In areas of concentrated disadvantage, where lack of educational, vocational, and social opportunities combine with pervasively high levels of poverty, virtually all of the inhabitants of that community find themselves similarly disadvantaged, so although an individual may have many strong ties to significant others, those connections do not yield any new opportunities.

The experience of concentrated disadvantage, urban poverty, and social disorga- nization fosters the types of breakdowns in systems of informal social control that Bursik and Grasmick and Sampson and his colleagues discussed. The result in terms of behavior regulation in these communities is a reliance on agents of formal social control, or public level controls. High crime rates in areas characterized by concen- trated disadvantage plus a reliance on agents of formal social control to regulate behavior result in disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system in terms of arrest, conviction, and ultimately incarceration for individuals in these communities [16]. The experience of incarceration is thus being disproportionately concentrated spatially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and disproportionately concentrated among the young urban minority males who live in those neighborhoods [25]. Although the use of incarceration is an action that is directed at individuals its “cumulative impact” is differentially distributed across places [10].

The concentration of incarceration and coercive mobility

Disproportionate distribution of the imprisonment experience

Social disorganization theory and research into concentrated disadvantage each highlight the underlying social processes that come together in certain places to destabilize mechanisms of social control to the point where crime rates increase and an over-reliance on formal agents of social control become the norm. Just as crime and conditions of poverty are not evenly distributed across the population, experience with incarceration is also concentrated spatially and racially. Mass incar- ceration has produced a system of social inequality that is cumulative and intergen- erational [26]. The distance between the relative rate of incarceration between blacks and whites has increased throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In the 1930s, blacks were approximately three times more likely to be incarcerated than blacks, and by the 1990s that ratio ratcheted up to the point where blacks were now seven times more likely than whites to be incarcerated [27]. When age is considered along with race, for black males under the age of 35, incarceration is a more likely life experience than both marriage and college [28]. Over 90% of incarcerated adults are male, and about half of those men are African American [29]. When you focus in on the interaction of age, race, and gender among incarcerated populations, it becomes abundantly clear that incarceration is disproportionately an experience of the young black male. In some urban areas, as many as one in six black males aged 20–44 are incarcerated at any given time [30]. Spatial concentration of the experience of incarceration among the urban, young male population has led to a normalized conceptualization of the imprisonment experience as an accepted – indeed perhaps expected – and survivable life event among that population [31–33].

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Crucially, incarceration does not just impact the person most directly affected – e.g. the offender – but has also had fairly profound effects on the families and children of those incarcerated [25, 26, 34]. Some of the most important work in this area has been that which has demonstrated the inter-generational impacts of incar- ceration. Recent research demonstrates that parental incarceration can negatively affect children terms of behavior and development [35–38] and their experiences with poverty [39–41]. When the collateral consequences of felony convictions are also taken into consideration, then the systematic exclusion of a large majority of the young, urban, male population from many aspects of the welfare state (public housing, employment in certain vocations, student loans, civic engagement through ballot voting, food stamps, to name a few) has far-reaching and long-lasting con- sequences for the imprisoned individuals, their families, and communities.

The coercive mobility thesis

Dina Rose and Todd Clear first proposed what has come to be known as the coercive mobility thesis in 1998 [11]. They argued that the forcible removal of individuals from communities through arrest and imprisonment, represented a type of coercive residential mobility that could weaken community capacity for effective informal social control just as more traditional mobility does. Relying heavily on the framework offered by Bursik and Grasmik [18], they argued that coercive mobility disrupts already tenuous social ties and networks in neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by incarceration furthering damage to (already com- promised) informal social control mechanisms. Moreover, coercive mobility is not unidirectional in terms of mobility to imprisonment only. Communities dis- proportionately affected by mass incarceration are locked in a continuous experience of coercive mobility due to prison cycling, or the ongoing process of admission to and release from imprisonment of offending populations. They argued that the regular turnover of a segment the population for the purpose of imprisonment would have important consequences for the human and social capital of communities and would serve as a major source of destabilization of informal social control mechanisms.

The traditional view of the incapacitative benefits of incarceration suggests that incarceration should enhance public safety because once offenders are removed from communities and incapacitated they cannot commit crime. Rose and Clear viewed this conceptualization of incarceration as a positive force for communities as too simplistic in that it assumes that offenders are only liabilities to their communities. Although their criminal behavior may be a liability, offenders are often also assets to their communities through their economic participation and contributions, their familial roles, and their participation in informal social control networks. The remov- al of a few offenders from the community may indeed positively impact informal social control and public safety in those area, but in areas where incarceration concentrates, the cycling of large numbers of (mostly male) offenders into and out of prisons means that the resources a community possesses to regulate behavior, achieve shared goals, and access services and resources are not only depleted, but, in a constant state of flux.

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Consequently, there is mounting evidence that incarceration as a crime control strategy might miss the mark and probably exacerbates social conditions known to be correlated with criminal behavior [42]. Incarcerated populations are disproportion- ately drawn from communities that can be categorized as socially disorganized, that have limited human and social capital, that maintain high levels of urban concentrated poverty, and that provide limited educational and vocational opportunities. There are obvious (and some less obvious) ways in which engaging these types of communities in a constant cycle of prison removal and return would have deleterious consequences for familial, economic, and political systems.

Tests of the coercive mobility thesis

Many scholars who focus on the effects of mass incarceration or the reentry process have examined the notion that incarceration may in fact have a detrimental impact on public safety in some places. Empirical tests of the coercive mobility thesis examine and lend some quantitative credence to assertion that highly concentrated incarceration negative- ly impacts public safety. In one the first of these tests, Todd Clear and his colleagues examined the relationship between crime and incarceration in Tallahassee, Florida by mapping those phenomena across 80 neighborhoods [43]. Clear et al. found evidence for a curvilinear relationship between incarceration rates and crime, demonstrating a “tipping point” effect. Up to a certain point, the removal of offenders for incarceration appeared to decrease crime rates; however, once a threshold for spatial concentration was reached in a neighborhood, higher rates of crime were observed.

In their attempt to replicate the findings of Clear and colleagues in a different setting, James Lynch and William Sabol used an instrumental variable – the drug arrest rate not explained by the index crime rate – in an analysis of the relationship between crime and incarceration across communities in Baltimore, Maryland [44, 45]. Lynch and Sabol found that prison admissions were negatively associated with crime rates, meaning that, in keeping with what one would expect were incarceration to have incapacitation or deterrence effects, as prison admissions increased, crime rates decreased. When the instrumental variable was removed from the models, the authors arrived at results similar to those which Clear and his colleagues had found in their Tallahassee analyses – prison admissions appeared to increase crime rates in certain neighborhoods. To test whether the impact of prison admissions on crime they were seeing might be due to the crime-inhibiting effects of incarceration and not to some other factor, the authors tested the effects of crime reduction on community organization and informal social control and concluded that incarceration has both positive and negative effects on the social control functions in communities [44]. The results of this study provide some support for the notion that incarceration might be harmful to social processes in some communities, but incarceration also reduces crime and appears to be associated with higher levels of participation in certain aspects of community organization (neighboring and community solidarity). Lynch and Sabol’s findings are important because they challenged some of the key assump- tions implicit in the coercive mobility model and suggested that some of the observed relationships in earlier coercive mobility work might have been spurious.

In 2006, Renauer and colleagues also attempted to reproduce evidence of a curvilinear relationship between crime rates in incarceration using community-level

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data from 95 neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon [46]. Using three estimation techni- ques, Renauer et al. found that, although their results varied by estimation type, in neighborhoods with moderate levels of incarceration, violent crime rates were re- duced, but in neighborhoods with high levels of incarceration violent crime rates increased. The authors interpreted these findings as providing fairly convincing support for the curvilinear relationship between crime rates and incarceration.

Although not direct tests of the coercive mobility thesis, John Hipp and colleagues have examined the effect that parolees returning to communities in California have on systems of private and parochial control in those communities and how the social- structural context of the neighborhoods that parolees return to affect recidivism [47, 48]. In the first of these studies, Hipp and Yates use panel data to test the hypothesis that returning parolees might bolster levels of informal social control by moderating the effect of the number of single-parent households on the crime rate. However, the authors found that the recidivism of returning parolees actually increased the crime rates in their communities upon their return. Hipp, Petersilia and Turner’s research offered an explanation as to why this might be the case. By examining the social context to which parolees return home in California, the authors found that the presence of service providers in a census tract or in a nearby census tract provided protection against recidivism, but that this protection was diminished by overtaxed service providers and by higher levels of concentrated disadvantage and social disorder. Overall, this vein of research demonstrates that the social context of offending matters, lending support to the tipping point argument of coercive mobil- ity—that in neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by incarceration, the effect of both admissions and releases occurring simultaneously produces the most destabilization and therefore the greatest impact on increasing crime rates.

In addition to attempts to replicate Clear and colleagues original finding of a curvilinear relationship between prison cycling and crime rates [43], a substantial body of additional research provides support for the coercive mobility thesis. Here we focus on the three areas of research (intergenerational effects, labor market effects, and effects on crime) as these most directly inform the studies that are part of this special issue.

Intergenerational effects of incarceration

The United States has been pursuing a “grand social experiment” in mass incarcer- ation since its move away from a rehabilitative ideal in the early 1970s [4, 49]. An entire generation or two of Americans have never lived in a time when mass incarceration was not the norm. The social fact of mass incarceration will have important social, economic and political consequences for multiple generations. If any body of research supports the contentions that mass incarceration (1) will “backfire” and foster breakdowns in informal social control [50], (2) contributes to the creation of an “underclass of the truly disadvantaged” in our society [20], and (3) is an essential aspect of the “ghettoization” of the Black urban poor in America [51], it is research into the intergenerational effects of incarceration. If urban minority children are living in conditions of considerable disadvantage, then the urban children of young, minority males with incarceration experiences are living in conditions of disadvantage that are demonstrably greater. One dataset in particular is contributing

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to emerging scholarship addressing intergenerational impacts: the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. The Fragile Families data derive from a population- based study of families (as opposed to a sample of inmates or offenders), and include a wide range of demographic, socioeconomic, and parental behavior measures (in- cluding arrest/incarceration reports) and multiple indicators of child development [38]. The Fragile Families study follows a cohort of 5,000 couples with children born between 1998 and 2000 in twenty large U.S. cities. Mothers and fathers (both married and unmarried) are surveyed at the time of the child’s birth and at ages one, three and five. Factors such as parental cognitive ability, impulsivity, educational attainment, marital status, level of economic disadvantage, labor market potential, health, and substance abuse are all measured through self-reports from parents. These data allow researchers to examine longitudinal effects of parental criminal involve- ment and incarceration on various outcomes for their children [38].

Findings from analyses of Fragile Families data demonstrate that paternal incar- ceration (controlling for maternal incarceration) significantly increases children’s externalizing problems by age five, has a greater effect on children than paternal absence due to other factors, and introduces economic hardships for children [52, 53]. Additional Fragile Families research has demonstrated that paternal incarceration introduces material hardship through both decreased earning potential and lack of co-habitation [37, 53]. Formerly incarcerated men who live with their families are less likely to contribute financially and, those who do contribute, are able to contrib- ute significantly less than their non-incarcerated counterparts. Formerly incarcerated men who are not cohabiting with their families are far less likely to contribute through child-support than their non-incarcerated counterparts paternal [37].

Paternal incarceration has also been linked to increased aggression in boys, and interestingly, that effect is stronger when the incarcerated father was neither incar- cerated for a violent offense nor abusive toward the mother, indicating that the removal of a more positive male role model had a differential effect on male child- ren’s aggressive behavior [36]. Although the same paternal incarceration does not seem to lead to aggressive behavior in girls, there is some evidence that removing abusive or otherwise negative paternal influences (violent offenders but not toward family members) may actually decrease male child aggression [36]. Taken together the research utilizing the Fragile Families data demonstrates that parental incarcera- tion (and paternal incarceration in particular) has important and lasting effects on both the behavior of and living conditions for their dependent children. These results demonstrate that incarceration has important intergenerational effects that become apparent relatively quickly. In other words, you don’t have to wait until the children of incarcerated parents start committing crime to see the effects of parental incarceration.

The first article in this issue helps us to think more broadly about the intergener- ational impact of incarceration. Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon have spent the past few years thinking about the broader effects of incarceration publishing a number of important articles in this area [39, 40, 54]. Although they did not use the Fragile Families data in their work, DeFina and Hannon have previously examined the impact of adult incarceration on both poverty and child poverty [39, 40]. In the first of the two studies, they demonstrate that not only has poverty increased as a direct result of growing rates of incarceration, but that but for mass incarceration, poverty

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rates would have “fallen considerably during the period.” In their follow-up study, the authors use county-level panel data from North Carolina spanning 1995–2007 to provide evidence that the concentration of mass incarceration among adults at the community level has important intergenerational consequences in terms of child poverty rates [40]. DeFina and Hannon found that mass incarceration significantly increased child poverty in counties with high proportions of non-white residents and in counties that had reduced “social safety nets” for children (i.e. poor educational opportunity, diminished governmental services). Although the nature of their data made it difficult to identify the specific mechanisms through which adult incarcera- tion increases poverty or child poverty, DeFina and Hannon argue that adult incar- ceration likely contributes to the poverty of children through: 1) the erosion of vocational skills while incarcerated, 2) the evaporation of his social network ties due to time spent imprisoned, 3) the acquisition of destructive attitudes and behav- iors, 4) the stigma associated with incarceration, and 5) reductions in wage earning potential, reduced future wage growth, and worsened employment prospects [40].

In this issue, they turn their attention to the crime promoting effects of parental incarceration through examining its impacts on delinquency. Using an expanded series of the North Carolina county-level panel data (1995–2009), in their article Sowing the Seeds, Hannon and DeFina provide a particularly rigorous empirical assessment of the relationship between adult imprisonment and juvenile delinquency. Using juvenile arrests as the indicator of delinquency, they find that controlling for adult arrests and other relevant factors, there remains “a significant positive acceler- ating relationship between adult imprisonment and juvenile arrest rates.” As in the Clear and colleagues original test of the coercive mobility thesis [43], Hannon and DeFina find a tipping point effect where “higher levels of incarceration rates have increasingly deleterious impacts that result in increasingly higher juvenile arrest rates.” In other words, the delinquency promoting effects of adult incarceration occur in those communities most affected by the mass incarceration of their residents and because those communities are, by and large, urban minority communities, the intergenerational effects of mass incarceration are felt most profoundly among minorities.

Labor market consequences

Mass incarceration also has important and far-reaching labor market consequences as well. Research examining the economic and labor market consequences of mass incarceration has run the spectrum ranging from micro-level examinations of the factors influencing individual hiring decisions made by employers to macro-level examinations of the relationship between mass incarceration, employment, and labor economics [24, 25, 55]. Labor market research often examines the “flip side” of the mass incarceration phenomenon; mass release. Labor market research has demon- strated that the scarcity of jobs disproportionately harms the disadvantaged job seekers, with ex-offenders representing the most disadvantaged [56]. Devah Pager has led a series of important studies focusing on the interaction between race, criminal records, and the ability to secure a job that have demonstrated the substantial barriers to post-conviction employment [57, 58]. Suffice to say for now, returning offenders represent the least employable population in the labor market – they tend to be young,

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under-educated, with limited vocational skills and the added stigma of criminal conviction and/or incarceration record, returning to areas characterized by concen- trated disadvantage [59]. When the formerly incarcerated are returned en masse to communities disproportionately affected by prison cycling, the consequences of their near inevitable unemployment also presents a mechanism through which these processes might serve to increase crime rates [27].

The second article in this special issue further contributes to our understand- ing of the labor market consequences of mass incarceration particularly in terms of its relationship to crime in communities. Kevin Drakulich, Robert Crutch- field, Ross Matsueda, and Kristin Rose bring together literatures on the effects of labor market dynamics and of community social organization to “[frame] concentrated incarceration as the source of a more general instability that manifests in the local labor and housing markets.” They argue that instability in labor and housing markets “has consequences for the social organization of the neighborhood—in particular limiting a community’s capacity for informal social control and resulting in labor market conditions conducive to criminal behavior.” Their work advances our understanding of the mechanisms through which processes associated with coercive mobility might directly affect the labor markets and social organizations in communities and thereby indirectly affect crime. To do so, they draw on some of Robert Crutchfield’s earlier labor stratification work [60] to argue that the high concentration of unemployed and underemployed residents in areas particularly affected by high rates of prisoner reentry might serve to create places where large numbers of residents have less of a stake in conformity and an increased potential for involvement in crime. Their analysis demonstrates “concentrations of returning prisoners are associated with a reduced capacity for collective efficacy, the fostering of social situations conducive to criminal behavior, and higher levels of violent crime.”

Effects on crime

Lastly, researchers continue to attempt to parse out the positive effects of incarcera- tion through incapacitation and/or deterrence from the negative effects produced by prison cycling processes. Some of the researchers engaged in this work have argued that there is likely a “reverse incapacitation effect” associated with prisoner reentry that essentially serves to offset any incapacitation benefit related to prison admissions [61]. Stephen Raphael and Michael Stoll, for example, have argued that “the average incapacitation effect on crime for each new prison admission is likely to be similar in absolute value to the reverse incapacitation effect associated with parole and other avenues of prisoner release” (p. 216). In recent work documenting this “reverse incapacitation effect,” DeFina and Hannon have recently argued that most previous incapacitation research has neglected to adequately account for the magnitude of the effect of reentry on the effects of incapacitation [54]. Noting that the “crime reducing effect of imprisonment hinges on the number of people incarcerated in a given year, but its criminogenic impact via reentry depends on the number of people released from prison in the current year and all past years” they argue that “omitting lagged effects leads to a significant understatement of reentry’s crime-producing impact” ([54] at p. 1005, emphasis added).

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In order to demonstrate the importance of accounting for lagged effects, DeFina and Hannon estimated two models using state-level panel data from 1978–2003: one that included only contemporaneous values of incarceration and reentry rates, and a second that included five lags of each variable to the contemporaneous variables. They found that, consistent with prior incapacitation effect research, when contem- poraneous incarceration and reentry rates are considered with no lagged variables, incarceration has a negative and significant effect on the property crime rate and interestingly, the contemporaneous reentry rate has a significant positive effect (though smaller in magnitude) suggesting that imprisonment can also be crimino- genic. But, as hypothesized, when the lagged model was estimated the cumulative negative and significant effect of incarceration is completely offset by the cumulative and positive effect of reentry ([54] at page 1008). Notably, their analysis demonstrat- ed that mass incarceration failed to reduce violent crime and mass reentry signifi- cantly increased the overall violent crime rate.

In the final article in this special issue, a longer time-series of the Tallahassee data initially collected by Todd Clear and his colleagues are examined by economist Gheert Dhondt, who uses a panel design and fixed effects regression model to simultaneously estimate the impact of admissions to prison and prison cycling (i.e. the combination of admissions to incarceration and releases from incarceration) on crime in Tallahassee neighborhoods. Dhondt finds that in Tallahassee neighborhoods with high rates of crime, prison admissions and the prison cycling process are associated with increased crime rates, but in neighborhoods with lower crime rates the same processes do not appear to increase crime rates. Dhondt’s findings provide additional support for the notion that incarceration impacts communities in different ways depending in large part on the volume of incarceration. In those areas most directly affected by mass incarceration (e.g. the areas where incarceration concen- trates), we tend to see increasing crime related to increasing use of incarceration and to the churning of offenders into and out of the community for the purpose of incarceration (prison cycling).

Coercive mobility and the future of mass incarceration research

Each of the articles in this special issue advances our understanding of some aspect of the impact of mass incarceration on crime in communities. Robert Sampson recently published an article in which he characterized the research on mass incarceration in terms of two eras [62]. In the first era, researchers tended to investigate the crime control effects of incarceration focusing on its capacity to control crime through incapacitation and deterrence. Increasingly criminological inquiry into the effects of incarceration has entered into what Sampson calls its second era, where we have shifted from researching incarceration’s crime control effects to focusing on the various deleterious crime producing effects of mass incarceration. Research in this second era, including much of the research lending support to the coercive mobility thesis, has focused on the socially corrosive and criminogenic effects of incarcerating large segments of the population en masse. Sampson argues that moving forward criminologists should enter into a third era of research where we no longer necessarily think of incarceration as “good” or “bad” (2011: 824), but instead in terms of its costs

Coercive mobility and the impact of prison-cycling on communities 471

and its benefits offering a full accounting of incarceration’s social ledger. According to Sampson, “Only by taking a dynamic macrolevel approach and better estimating ‘net harms’… can we ultimately understand what incarceration has wrought, for better or for worse—or quite possibly for naught.” [62] We are quite confident that coercive mobility research, with its explicit recognition of incarceration’s simulta- neous crime control and crime producing effects, will remain an important compo- nent of any third era mass incarceration research agenda.

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