Mapping prison proliferation: Region, rurality, race and disadvantage in prison placement

Perhaps the leading perspective on how and where prisons are located stems from the perspective of the prison industrial complex (PIC). Implicit, if not explicit, in the PIC perspective is the notion that Black and Hispanic prisoners are exploited for the benefit of poor, unemployed, White prison towns. Unfortunately, however, there has been a shortage of empirical scrutiny of this central notion. This paper examines this claim with a rare event logistic regression analysis of 176 new prison placements across 13,155 rural places in the 1990s in the US. In contrast to the PIC perspective, prison towns are disproportionately southern and poor, and have a larger population with a greater share of Blacks and Hispanics. The analysis yields three further challenges to the PIC perspective on prison towns. First, findings suggest rural prison placement does not cause racial and economic inequality as much as prison siting results from concentrated rural disadvantage. Second, there is not one prototypical prison town. Instead, there are typologies of prison towns based on US region, race, town population size, race, prior proximate prison, and SES. Lastly, future studies should consider the theoretical and methodological implications of rural concentrated disadvantage in measuring prison impact.