This talk is part the Vera Institute of Justice’s Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series. Although registration to attend this event in-person has ended, the talk will be livestreamed.
Over the last four decades, mass imprisonment transformed the character of poverty and community life in the United States. However, few studies have examined community conditions of incarceration beyond large, metropolitan cities. In an analysis of a unique spatial dataset of prison admissions in Massachusetts (1973-2014), Professor Jessica Simes will explore the historical trajectory of mass incarceration as it relates to local conditions of racial segregation, poverty, crime, and patterns of social control. Findings show racial disparities in incarceration vary distinctly by place – across metropolitan cities, smaller central cities, suburbs, and towns. In addition, the spatial pattern of imprisonment has changed dramatically over the course of the prison boom, pointing to isolated urban and suburban areas with extreme levels of state prison admissions and a pattern of “concentrated decarceration” in Boston. In sum, mass incarceration emerged not just to manage distinctively urban social problems but was characteristic of a broader mode of governance that could be seen in communities often far-removed from deep inner-city poverty.
Jessica T. Simes is an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University with broad interests in punishment, urban inequality, poverty and marginality, and immigration. In her research, she studies the neighborhood conditions of mass imprisonment and the enduring racial disparities in incarceration, using prison records to understand spatial inequalities in incarceration in historical perspective across Massachusetts cities and neighborhoods. Keenly interested in data visualization and spatial methods, Simes focuses on describing the prison boom through mapping to understand the broad impacts of incarceration on communities. Simes received her B.A. from Occidental College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.