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This article explores how incarceration affects crime rates at the neighborhood level. Incarceration is analyzed as a form of residential mobility that may damage local network structures and undermine informal control. Geocoded data are combined with census data, data on incarceration convictions and releases, and crime data for Tallahassee, Florida. The results show a positive relationship between the rate of releases one year and the community's crime rates the following year. They also show that low rates of admissions to prison have an uncertain impact on crime rates, moderate rates reduce crime, and higher rates increase crime. Implications for criminal justice policies are discussed.
Theorists working in the social disorganization tradition have long focused on three ecological predictors of crime: poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility (Shaw & McKay, 1942). Contemporary researchers have expanded that list to examine the impact of additional factors, such as single-parent families, structural density, and urbanization (Bursik, 1986, 1988; Bursik & Grasmick, 1993; Sampson, 1985; Sampson & Groves 1989). These forces are thought to promote crime through the way they increase social disorganization, reduce social integration, increase isolation and anonymity, and reduce informal social control. Advances in social disorganization theory have helped to update our understanding of the ways in which urban areas have changed since the first exposition of these ideas in the 1940s. Other studies (Bursik & Grasmick 1993; Morenoff, Sampson, & Raudenbush, 2001; Rountree & Warner, 1999; Sampson & Groves, 1989; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earles, 1997) have attempted to specify the mediating factors of disorganization. Taken as a body, social disorganization theory has an extraordinarily rich conceptual and empirical heritage, and a broad literature has developed regarding the sources of social disorganization.
Rose and Clear (1998a) hypothesized that high concentrations of incarceration may be another disorganizing factor. They put forth the idea that incarceration, especially at high rates, could disrupt social networks by damaging familial, economic, and political sources of informal social control. The consequence of this damage, they theorized, would be more, not less, crime. From their review of the literature, Rose and Clear first showed how high rates of incarceration may be expected to damage fragile social networks that constitute the basis for informal social control. They also argued that prison releasees, many of...