Description

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Punishing Places applies a unique spatial analysis to mass incarceration in the United States. It demonstrates that our highest imprisonment rates are now in small cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Jessica Simes argues that mass incarceration should be conceptualized as one of the legacies of U.S. racial residential segregation, but that a focus on large cities has diverted vital scholarly and policy attention away from communities affected most by mass incarceration today. This book presents novel measures for estimating the community-level effects of incarceration using spatial, quantitative, and qualitative methods. This analysis has broad and urgent implications for policy reforms aimed at ameliorating the community effects of mass incarceration and promoting alternatives to the carceral system.

About the Author

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Jessica T. Simes is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University.

Praise For…

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"Simes’s careful engagement with…data builds to a compelling central argument. . . .Punishing Places contributes to a broader conversation within carceral studies that analyzes domestic policing as warfare."
— Public Books

"Punishing Places contributes to a growing literature on the complex relationships between race, crime, and punishment."
— Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

"Simes’s emphasis on community is a compelling and hopeful one, and a link between sociology and efforts to restore that which mass imprisonment has destroyed."
— American Journal of Sociology