Reciprocal effects of crime and incarceration in New York city neighborhoods.

• Author: Fagan, Jeffrey

INTRODUCTION

The concentration of incarceration in social groups and areas has emerged in the past decade as a topic of research and policy interest. This interest was fueled by several factors: persistent continued growth of incarceration through the 1990s, even as crime rates fell nationally for over seven years; (1) persistent racial disparities in incarceration; (2) assessments of the collateral consequences of incarceration that potentially aggravate the causal dynamics that lead to elevated crime rates; (3) rapid growth in the number of returning prisoners to their communities; (4) an influx that may strain social control in neighborhoods where social and economic disadvantages have already created acute crime risks.

While there is consistent evidence of the social concentration of incarceration among poor non-white males, there have been few studies of the spatial concentration of incarceration in neighborhoods in the nation's large cities. Recent evidence suggests that the growing social concentration of incarceration is tied to the spatial concentration of incarceration in poor urban neighborhoods. (5) In 1996-97, Professor Todd Clear and his colleagues examined the effects of incarceration admissions and returns in Tallahassee, Florida neighborhoods using a two-wave panel design. (6) Professors James Lynch and William Sabol (7) estimated incarceration rates by neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, focusing on concentration of prisoners spatially and temporally. (8) These studies show that the risks of going to jail or prison grow over time for persons living in poor neighborhoods, contributing to the accumulation of social and economic adversity for people living in these areas, as well as to the overall well-being of the neighborhood itself. (9) These studies notwithstanding, incarceration has generally been omitted as an ecological factor in the production of crime, particularly in research on crime in neighborhoods.

Yet, there are several reasons to consider incarceration as part of an ecological dynamic of crime in neighborhoods. High rates of incarceration can adversely affect the ability of returning prisoners to re-enter labor markets, and thus aggravate social and economic disadvantages within areas where former inmates are concentrated. (10) Incarceration often disrupts family ties and social networks, aggravating vulnerabilities to crime through compromises to social control, creating a churning effect on social networks. (11) Incarceration destabilizes crime networks and potentially introduces systemic violence associated with competition among crime groups for territory and market share. (12) High rates of incarceration may also reduce incentives for citizens to participate in informal social control by reducing the communicative value of sanctions, de-legitimizing law and legal actors, further inviting crime, and intensifying the crime-enforcement-incarceration-crime cycle. (13) Incarceration potentially stigmatizes neighborhoods, complicating the ability of residents to access job hiring networks to enter and compete in labor markets, (14) and deterring businesses from locating in those areas. (15) These dynamics suggest that incarceration is not simply a consequence of neighborhood crime, but instead may transform into an intrinsic part of the ecological dynamics of neighborhoods that may actually elevate crime within neighborhoods. The locus of these effects is at a small social level: within neighborhoods or other small spatial aggregates. Identifying and estimating these dynamics is the focus of this Essay.

This Essay uses data from New York City on neighborhood rates of incarceration in jail or prison in five waves over a twelve-year period beginning in 1985. New York City experienced an epidemic of drugs and serious violence that peaked over a decade ago, and then fell steeply in the ensuing years. (16) Rates of incarceration spiked sharply after 1985 as crime rates rose. (17) Higher incarceration rates persisted through the 1990s, declining far more slowly than the sharply falling crime rates. (18) We show that the use of incarceration, especially prison, seems to have differential effects across the City's neighborhoods and police precincts, and that the overall excess of incarceration rates over crime rates seems to be concentrated among non-white males living in the City's poorest neighborhoods.

We then show that neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration invite closer and more punitive police enforcement and parole surveillance, contributing to the growing number of repeat admissions and the resilience of incarceration, even as crime rates fall. Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration. These dynamics spiral over time in a reciprocal dynamic that at some tipping point is likely to reach equilibrium. (19) It is, quite literally, a vicious cycle. The dynamic becomes self-sustaining and reinforcing, and continues even as externalities such as labor market dynamics or population structure undergo significant change, as well as in the face of declining crime rates and receding drug epidemics.

The Essay then examines social, economic, legal, and political mechanisms through which spatial concentration transforms a spike in incarceration from an acute external shock into an enduring internal feature of the neighborhood fabric, a dynamic process that then persists regardless of law or policy, and well in excess of the supply of criminals. The constant rearrangement of social networks through removal and return of prisoners becomes a systemic part of neighborhood life and its social norms. Incarceration creates a supply of both crime and more incarceration. We illustrate the contributions of law and policy to incarceration dynamics that persist even in eras of declining crime. When high incarceration rates are internalized into the ecology of small, homogeneous neighborhoods, it adversely affects the economic fortunes, political participation, family life, and normative orientation of people living in the social context of imprisonment and its aftermath. The Essay concludes with a discussion of how this concentration distorts the relationships between citizens and the law, both to those living in areas affected by these dynamics, and those outside whose views of these neighborhoods and their residents influence their policy preferences.

1. CRIME AND INCARCERATION IN NEW YORK CITY

   Beginning in the 1980s and continuing today, the number of persons incarcerated in the United States increased massively, incapacitating many criminals and increasing the risks of punishment for those still active. (20) Between 1975 and 1989, the total annual prison population of the United States nearly tripled, growing from 240,593 to 679,623 inmates in custody, an increase of 182 percent. (21) The trend continued uninterrupted through 1996, when the prison population rose to 1,138,984. (22) Put another way, the incarceration rate rose from about 145 per 100,000 population in 1980, to 445 per 100,000 in 1997. (23) Both the likelihood of being committed to prison, and the average sentence length once committed, increased dramatically over that time. (24)

   Incarceration trends in New York City and State have followed similar trends. (25) New York State's prison population--approximately seventy percent of State inmates come from New York City--is now nearly 70,000, up from 55,000 in 1990. (26) And New York City's average daily jail inmate population was 17,897 in 1999, which is only slightly lower than the 1990 population of 19,643. (27) Rates of incarceration in New York City have been largely unaffected by the City's dramatic declines in crime. (28) Since 1990, when crime rates began to drop, the number of people receiving sentences of incarceration in the city--either prison or jail--has hovered between 78,000 and 96,000. (29) In fact, the number of people sentenced to incarceration in 1990--the height of the City's most recent crime wave--is comparable to the number in 1997 (92,261 and 93,141, respectively), despite the fact that by 1997 crime counts were at an eight year low. (30) Between 1990 and 1997, the city experienced a fifty percent decline in the number of index crimes, yet the number of prison sentences imposed declined by only nineteen percent.

   The increase in incarceration may be attributed to aggressive enforcement of drug laws, especially street-level enforcement, resulting in large numbers of felony arrests of retail drug sellers. (31) For over a decade, drug-related offenses have accounted for an increasing proportion of prison admissions: from just twelve percent of all New York State prison admissions in 1985, to thirty-one percent in 1990, to thirty-eight percent in 1996. (32) Despite the dramatic decreases in crime in New York City, (33) drug-related arrests have continued to increase, (34) and continue to incarcerate large numbers of New York City residents--ll,600 entered New York State prisons on drug-related offenses in 1995, compared with 9,345 in 1990. (35) Because these inmates are likely to serve longer sentences, drug offenders comprised a growing proportion of the City's and State's incarcerated population.

   Table 1 shows the dynamics of crime, enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing that have contributed to incarceration growth beginning in 1985, the year before the onset of the crack epidemic in New York, and continuing through 1997, when crime had declined sharply in the City. (36) The table shows that the number and rate of prison sentences (per arrest and per conviction) rose at a faster pace than did crime from 1985 through 1990, and then declined more slowly than did crime from 1991 through 1997. (37) Reported index crimes, including violent felonies and major property crimes, rose by nearly eighteen percent from 1985...