Punishing Places:
The Geography of Mass Imprisonment in America
The Geography of Mass Imprisonment in America
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.
Available for purchase here.
Read excerpts at Inquest and UC Press Blog.
Read reviews at American Journal of Sociology, Public Books and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
For more information, visit punishingplaces.org
Reviews & Awards
2023 Ida B. Wells-Barnett Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association, Crime, Law, and Deviance Section
2022 Robert E. Park Best Book Award, American Sociological Association, Community & Urban Sociology Section
"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."—Brittany Friedman, American Journal of Sociology
"Where Punishing Places shines instead, however, is in pointing attention to the dynamics of race and punishment in under-researched smaller cities—calling for scholars to draw a wider net in the places they study. By focusing deeply on place, Punishing Places contributes to a growing literature on the complex relationships between race, crime, and punishment."—Michelle S. Phelps, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
"Simes’s careful engagement with this data builds to a compelling central argument: though domestic carceral geographies may be transformed, race remains the 'organizing mechanism producing durable inequality in place and punishment.'"—Emma Shaw Crane, Public Books
"Incredibly well-conceived. Draws scholarly attention to under-studied places, while also providing important theoretical insights into how place serves as an important marker of the imprisonment experience."—Elizabeth Brown, author of Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice
"Through masterful analysis and superb insight, Punishing Places challenges conventional wisdom about the American criminal legal system. Moving our field of vision beyond urban centers to small cities and rural towns—places sorely overlooked in scholarship and reporting—Simes reveals that mass incarceration is far more pervasive, excessive, and damaging than most imagine. This remarkably important book not only captures the vulnerabilities and losses facing marginalized places, but gives us hopeful steps for reversing the tide and making these communities whole."—Forrest Stuart, author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest
"The original and important analyses presented in this book demand that we shift our gaze, to recognize and explore how mass incarceration matters in the lives of the dispossessed - especially for those who live in places far from the urban centers that have a grip on our collective imagination."—Katherine Beckett, Chair and Professor, Law, Societies & Justice Department and Professor of Sociology, University of Washington
"Utilizing a unique and rare dataset, Simes shows that preoccupation with urban areas and crime has led to a myopic focus on big cities to the exclusion of smaller cities in terms of understanding the contribution of the interaction between neighborhood disadvantage and imprisonment."—Tracey L. Meares, Yale Law School