Mass Imprisonment across the Rural-Urban Interface

Abstract

Academic work on crime and punishment has focused mostly on urban centers, leaving rural communities understudied, except for acknowledgement that rural communities warehouse a large number of prisoners and that rural prisons provide jobs and economic development for some struggling communities. This study uses a novel dataset that includes information on the home addresses of all prisoners in Arkansas from 1993 to 2003 to document imprisonment rates and racial disparities in imprisonment rates across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties. We show how rural communities both receive and produce prisoners and that imprisonment and racial disparities in imprisonment vary more within different types of communities than across different types of communities. Further, we find that nonmetropolitan rates of imprisonment are higher than would be expected, based on observed local risk factors such as poverty rate. We close with a discussion of what these findings illustrate about concentrated disadvantage across the rural-urban interface.