Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment

by Jessica T. Simes

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Social Justice

251 pages, Paperback

Published October 26, 2021

Reviews

[Viral · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredibly technical and quantified analysis of the spatial geography of mass incarceration in the U.S., focusing specifically on Massachusetts but with implications for the whole country. Simes does an incredibly thorough and detailed analysis of incarceration, arrest, and conviction rates across the whole state of Massachusetts, and makes numerous critical insights that are of direct relevance to anyone who cares about PIC abolition. She shows very effectively that though much of the "law and order" and much of the "progressive reform/radical abolitionist" focus is on big cities, mid-sized/small cities show very high rates of incarceration as well - sometimes even higher than that of the big cities that get all of the focus (good and bad).

Simes uses this information to inform a broader analysis of mass incarceration, as not just a system that targets urban residents but as a broader system of state produced inequality that is then used to justify state control and surveillance. This means that the legal system necessarily produces racial inequality in incarceration. Incarceration is downstream of policing, and policing is a fundamentally *spatial* form of state intervention in life, and *space* is fundamentally racially segregated across the country. She even effectively utilizes public health framings of "excess mortality" to construct a framework of "excess incarceration", demonstrating how Black communities in Massachusetts are disproportionally punished at rates that defy logic, defy reality of actual measures of crimes committed (by comparing to baseline data the precedes the current socio-legal regime). The social and economic disruption that this incarceration produces is a fundamental component of maintaining and exacerbating this segregation, because of how it disrupts households, communities, and neighborhoods.

Unfortunately this book is really technical and scientific at times, which I appreciate for its precision but limits its broader readability. But the message embedded here, of how we should be thinking about mass incarceration as not simply a byproduct *of* segregation but something that is fundamentally in dialectic *with* segregation, is one that is very insightful and useful for those seeking to change the nature of the beast.

[Xavier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simes offers a theoretically rich and empirically progressive agenda for how to deal with not only the place-based nature of punishment but also how to think beyond the city when addressing the effects of mass incarceration. What's more, she nudges readers towards an abolitionist critique of prisons, jails, and police where healing is centered rather than reacting to harm.

There are many things I love: the synthesis of theory, the measured and comprehensive agenda, and even a serious consideration of abolitionist perspectives. On the other hand, there are still moments that are not as pristine, such as a moral appeal for the state to curtail its own violence even as previous scholars (e.g. Loïc Wacquant) outline that penal policy IS state policy. Beyond sociology, thinkers like Joy James, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Ruha Benjamin might even go as far to stay that abolition must also include the abolition of the nation-state as it is the locus of imperialism, capitalism, and anti-Black violence.

This all being said, Simes offers an engaging work that is only limited but its sparse engagement with more radical policies and measures.

[Anusha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish.

[Eli Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it great data and info