Forthcoming, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol 112 A Natural Experiment of the Consequences of Concentrating Former Prisoners in the Same Neighborhoods

More than 600,000 prisoners are released from incarceration each year in the United States, and most end up residing in metropolitan areas, clustered within a select few neighborhoods. Likely consequences of this concentration of returning prisoners include higher rates of subsequent crime and recidivism. In fact, one-half of released prisoners return to prison within only 3 years of release. The routine exposure to criminogenic influences and criminal opportunities portends a bleak future for individuals who reside in neighborhoods with numerous other ex-prisoners. Through a natural experiment focused on post–Hurricane Katrina Louisiana, I examine a counterfactual scenario: if instead of concentrating ex-prisoners in geographic space, what would happen to recidivism rates if ex-prisoners were dispersed across space? Findings reveal that a decrease in the concentration of parolees in a neighborhood leads to a significant decrease in the re-incarceration rate of former prisoners. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: There are roughly five million formerly imprisoned individuals residing in U.S. neighborhoods, yet this population is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of neighborhoods, typically within metropolitan areas. I find that concentrating former prisoners in the same neighborhoods leads to significantly higher recidivism rates than if exprisoners were more dispersed across neighborhoods. The reasons why ex-prisoners concentrate in a select few urban neighborhoods include personal factors such as social ties to the neighborhood, but they also include institutional and structural barriers such as parole policies and housing market dynamics. Policy solutions that disperse the geographic concentration of former prisoners, while leading to some geographic displacement of recidivism, would likely yield a net reduction in recidivism in aggregate. INTRODUCTION One in every 100 adults in the United States is in prison or jail at this very moment, with approximately 1.6 million individuals serving time in state and federal prisons and another 745,000 in local jails (1 – 3). Most of these individuals are not “lifers” and will eventually be released from incarceration. Although the War on Drugs and the “tough on crime” sentencing policies of the 1980s and 1990s facilitated the mass removal of criminals from many U.S. metropolitan neighborhoods, recent decades have been characterized by a growing number of individuals returning to these very same neighborhoods following their exit from prison. In 1980, roughly 170,000 prisoners were released from state and federal prisons back into the community (4). By 2010, that number had surpassed 700,000, before falling recently (5, 6). In total there are roughly five million formerly imprisoned individuals residing in U.S. neighborhoods (7), representing a significant subset of the socioeconomically disadvantaged population in the United States. Despite the sheer magnitude of returning prisoners in the United States, most neighborhoods are untouched by prisoner reentry. The geographic distribution of prisoner reentry is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of neighborhoods within metropolitan areas. For instance, research by the Urban Institute reveals that more than one-half of prisoners released from Illinois prisons in 2001 returned to Chicago, and one-third of these formerly incarcerated individuals were concentrated in only six community areas (8). These six communities are among the most economically and socially disadvantaged in the city. Indeed the fact that neighborhood disadvantage and the geographic concentration of former prisoners is so highly correlated—for example, the correlation between disadvantage and incarceration rates is roughly 0.80 in Chicago (9)—makes it challenging to try to empirically isolate the effect of Prisoner reentry refers to the process of leaving prison and returning to the community. 2 concentrated prisoner reentry from the other forms of social adversity that characterize disadvantaged neighborhoods (e.g., unemployment, school failure, and family instability). Research suggests that up to one-half of individuals released from prison have been in prison on at least one other occasion, and that more than two-thirds of returning prisoners are rearrested within three years of prison release and almost one-half are re-incarcerated (10, 11). In fact, recidivism rates are essentially unchanged over the past decade despite unprecedented spending on incarceration and other strategies aimed at criminal deterrence. Whether these patterns—concentrated prisoner reentry and stubbornly high rates of criminal recidivism—are causally linked is a question that has received scant attention in the research literature, in part because of the methodological challenges of disentangling the relationship. Yet, there are sound theoretical reasons to expect that concentrated prisoner reentry undermines a former offender’s ability to reintegrate into society. The extreme concentration of criminals in geographic space likely produces a contagion effect that not only leads to elevated rates of recidivism among existing criminals but also pulls the previously noncriminal toward deviance. When individuals are embedded in neighborhood networks with numerous other felons, it may be far less likely that they will comply with the law. Accordingly, through investigation of a natural experiment focused on post–Hurricane Katrina Louisiana, this study investigates the following question: if instead of concentrating ex-prisoners in geographic space, what would happen to recidivism rates if ex-prisoners were dispersed across space? THE CONCENTRATION OF PRISONER REENTRY AND RECIDIVISM A key question is why, exactly, would concentrated reentry and recidivism be causally linked? The reasons can be broadly categorized by whether returning prisoners are agents of