I have been thinking a lot about the question: “Why is mass incarceration invisible to most Americans?”  One answer that has been proposed by researchers Robert J. Sampson and Charles Loeffler is that “spatial inequality in punishment helps explain the widespread invisibility of mass incarceration to the average American (p.20).”

Looking specifically at Chicago as a case study,  the researchers found that prisoners primarily come from the South and West Sides.  According to them, “Large areas of Chicago have escaped the brunt of the incarceration regime, while a small band of communities on the West, far West, South, and far South Sides of Chicago are highly affected.”

Bruce Bower in Science News has more about the study by Sampson and Loeffler:

Chicago crime data for 1990 to 1995 show that a large majority of prison and jail populations came from two poor, black sections of the city, Sampson and Loeffler found. During that time, overall rates of crime and violence declined in Chicago while incarceration rates rose in those two areas.

Following these encouraging crime reductions, Chicago officials closed massive public housing units in the two high-crime, high-incarceration areas because they were considered breeding grounds for drug dealing and violence.

But between 2000 and 2005, the geographic location of each incarceration hot spot in Chicago shifted slightly to the southwest as former public housing residents sought new homes. Incarceration rates in the two new hot spots remained about the same as those in the old ones from a decade earlier, Sampson said.

What this suggests to me is that since most prisoners come from few neighborhoods, we have many places that are seemingly innoculated from the trend of prison expansion.  As such, Sampson suggests that the term “mass incarceration” may not be the right one to characterize the current problem of huge numbers of incarcerated people.  This is something that I really have to think about further.  Is it not considered Mass because only certain populations in certain parts of the country are being most targeted and directly impacted?  It’s definitely something worth considering in greater depth.