In the opening of chapter two of Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment, Jessica T. Simes recounts the story of a group that dubbed themselves The Think Tank. This group, started in 1979 and comprised of incarcerated men at Green Haven prison in upstate New York, began conducting a study that would be seminal to understanding the connection between communities and prisons, and profoundly influential in understanding mass incarceration as an urban phenomenon. Using state assembly districts as the basis for their study, The Think Tank found that “approximately three-quarters of all incarcerated people in the late 1970s and 1980s in New York State hailed from Harlem, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the South Bronx, South Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, and East New York in Brooklyn.” Understandably, this groundbreaking study lead sociologists, criminologists, and those who are influenced by their work to surmise that mass incarceration in the United States is an urban issue with an urban genesis. In Punishing Places, however, Simes aims to take “the Think Tank’s insights seriously” by “going wherever the data take us” to new views of mass incarceration and its relationship to communities outside of urban spaces.
Professor Simes uses data from the Massachusetts Department of Correction (MADOC) and interviews with social service providers (with several other sources, as well) to reveal a new pattern of mass incarceration that has shifted away from urban centers to small cities and suburbs, while continuing to disproportionately burden not just Black and Latino people who are incarcerated, but Black and Latino neighborhoods as well. Before diving into the data, however, Simes begins by describing the two prevailing perspectives in criminology and (urban) sociology that attempt to explain, now erroneously, why incarceration rates are highest in segregated urban neighborhoods. The social control perspective focuses on policing strategies and their fixation on the poor and minorities irrespective of crimes committed, while the urban inequality perspective takes the view that “rates of incarceration and violence are highest in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” Simes then attempts to unify both theories while also adding a new, spatial awareness beyond the usual focus on large cities. She explains that a unified theory combining social control with a more inclusive spatial awareness of inequality would better account for the movement of the concentration of mass imprisonment from urban neighborhoods to small cities.
Simes’ project is admirable and ambitious. She provides a clear primer for those unfamiliar with the study of nonmetropolitan geographies and sociologies before delving more deeply into data from MADOC. The data show that small cities “have a 22 percent higher prison admission rate than Boston census tracts,” and that eleven Massachusetts cities comprising less than “a quarter of the total state population, accounted for over half of prison admissions” from 2009-2017. These cities are, largely, majority-minority and were once prosperous manufacturing communities that have fallen on tough times. Simes’ account of the shared characteristics of these communities makes clear that ignoring small cities in the contemporary study of mass incarceration relies on outdated assumptions, and generates an incomplete understanding of the phenomenon. Using MADOC data and other county level data throughout the United States, Professor Simes comes to a persuasive conclusion: “[M]ass incarceration is better characterized as a broad mode of governance affecting communities beyond large metropolitan cities.” Due to a greater punitiveness in the criminal legal system, the devastating effects of mass incarceration in small cities exacerbates other forms of disadvantage caused by economic decline and democratic shifts, making small cities punishing places to live.
Professor Simes acknowledges that legal and political scholars have done some work theorizing why incarceration rates have recently skyrocketed in small cities, but argues that more research is necessary to explain the social and spatial causes of this increase. While scholarship has focused on the fact that “criminalization and punishment are local,” and that the unique political conditions that arise in small cities are “ripe for harsh punishment,” Simes expands on these theories. She argues that small cities are subject to “overwhelming policy neglect.” She urges greater attention to both socioeconomic conditions of these cities, and to the policies designed to address those conditions. She also observes that the racism of the criminal legal system does not change just because it now imprisons those from small cities rather than minority neighborhoods in urban places; rather, it remains “remarkably consistent,” especially since neighborhoods in small cities are segregated in similar ways as large ones.
In exploring the policy neglect faced by small cities, Simes offers powerful vignettes from interviews she and a research assistant conducted with social service providers in small Massachusetts cities. Many of these interviews emphasized the difficulties faced by small city residents facing joblessness, addiction, poverty, and housing insecurity. Transportation, or a lack thereof, frequently derails efforts to secure employment or access recovery services. In one example, a representative of a job training center explained that without a car, one might need to take a bus from a small city to a larger one with more plentiful employment opportunities, but that bus commute might take four hours each direction, and be cost-prohibitive. Another service provider offering reentry services shared that a woman attempting to travel from the Springfield area to Boston for court-ordered addiction treatment suffered a heart attack while attempting to reach Boston using the service provider’s transportation service. Tragically, the two-and-a-half-hour trip proved fatal. While these interviews make the data come alive, insights from social service clients would have offered an even more direct account of the challenges faced by those living in punishing places. Simes details the policy neglect that small cities face when ignored and passed over for large cities, as well as the cumulative effects of the lack of both housing and employment opportunities. Including direct accounts from individuals battling these obstacles could have offered an even clearer lens through which to understand these problems.
Punishing Places also shows that even as the centers of mass incarceration have shifted from large cities to small ones, that does not mean that it no longer functions in a fundamentally racist fashion. Anyone who has studied small cities and nonurban spaces is familiar with the pervasive stereotype that communities outside large urban centers are primarily white and strongly conservative. Small cities also face the specter of extreme racial segregation. Simes argues that place itself and the disadvantages found in small cities drives mass incarceration not just by harming those who are imprisoned, but the communities who are left behind, too.
Simes introduces the concept of “communities of pervasive incarceration,” exhorting the reader to see not just the context and cumulative effects of mass incarceration, but also that segregation is “the missing stage in explaining the persistence of racial disparities” that are so persistent. Punishing Places challenges scholars – and anyone who cares about the racism of mass incarceration – to stop considering only large-scale numbers, and to get a granular look at neighborhoods in order to fully understand the harms that are inflicted on communities of pervasive incarceration. Using MADOC data, Simes demonstrates that even as the centers of mass incarceration have moved to small cities, massive racial disproportionalities still exist for those living in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Simes chooses to separate Latinos and their neighborhoods from those of Black and White communities, and this choice could use explanation. “Latinx” of course, is an ethnicity and not a race and, contrary to what has long been believed in the United States, Latinos can be Black and/or White, as well as other races. So, what makes for a “Latino” neighborhood when such neighborhoods are often multiracial? Are some Latinx people not being counted as Latinx if they live in a neighborhood that is primarily Black or White otherwise? From what is presented in Punishing Places, it is hard to say.
Simes concludes by introducing novel measures and understandings of mass incarceration including those of community loss, excess punishment, and vulnerability to intense formal social control before suggesting further avenues of research. One of the most exciting aspects of Punishing Places is, however, how it confronts one of the core guiding ethics of social science and sociology: the “value-free ideal” that births a professional posturing of remaining observational and neutral. Simes convincingly argues that values and science need not exist in a false tension. Rather, “embracing our normative commitments presents new opportunities to harness knowledge and conduct moral investigations often relegated to the all too brief conclusions” of scholarly works. It is a provocative and refreshing statement to see in a work of sociology, and Simes is clear that her book seeks to draw attention to the challenges of those in communities of pervasive incarceration, and to lessen the harm they suffer, through her use of more overtly normative sociology. While this framework should be clear to the reader by the time they reach its description near the end of the book, featuring it front and center would have made it more impactful and would give the reader greater opportunity to see how important a perspective it is while exploring the new geographies of punishing places that Simes reveals.
