Abstract
This article examines how urban ecology influences planning scholarship on crime and how critical carceral studies might expand it. While the ecological framework leads planners and scholars in cognate disciplines to explore the social, economic, and physical dimensions of crime, its lack of attention to criminal justice policies and practices can prove limiting. To rectify this, this article reviews critical carceral studies. It casts into relief how intensifications in criminal justice policies, transformations in their social functions, and their role in aiding redevelopment affect geographies of crime. It concludes by exploring how these insights may be incorporated in planning scholarship.
Thinking Ecologically about Crime
This article examines how the Chicago School’s “urban ecology” has influenced planning scholarship on urban crime and how critical carceral studies might expand these works. Although the merits of the ecological framework have been debated in planning circles (McHarg, Steiner, and Yaro 1998), and alternatives to ecology such as the Los Angeles School have made significant contributions (Davis 1992; Dear 2001; Soja 2010), planners embracing the ecological model have nonetheless proven most influential among academic researchers, architects, and city policy makers (see Chapple 2001). This scholarship draws on the University of Chicago’s celebrated sociologists, whose watershed works linked crime rates to neighborhood ethnic compositions, median household incomes, home ownership rates, population turnover, and physical attributes in urban areas (Park 1915; Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925; Shaw and McKay 1942). Some embracing this framework investigate the social, economic, and physical dimensions of crime in urban contexts. Those focusing on the social dimensions study relations between crime, subcultures (Briggs 1997; Ganapati 2008), and social networks (Briggs 2004; Rohe 2004). Other planners emphasize the economic dimension and analyze how labor (Galster, Hayes, and Johnson 2005; Fan 2012) and property markets (Griffiths and Tita 2009) relate to geographic distributions of crime in cities. Some also explore how physical environments intersect with crime patterns (Howland 2007; Lens 2013). Each strand demonstrates firm roots in the ecological school, which has proven so influential among planners studying urban crime that it often escapes critical scrutiny (Saegert, Winkel, and Swartz 2002). But insightful as these works are, one crucial, analytical object often escapes systemic scrutiny in this research: the criminal justice system.
Drawing on critical carceral studies, this article builds the case that the ecological focus on social, economic, and physical correlates of urban crime can deflect attention from how the structure of criminal justice institutions affects geographies of urban crime. Challenging taken for granted boundaries of crime and punishment, critical carceral studies investigate the various ways in which the state affects the location and mobility of criminalized groups, and how this subsequently influences geographies of crime. A central insight in this work is that the state’s active concentration of criminalized groups does not only occur in prisons and jails but permeates a variety of public spaces as well (Peck 2003; Martin and Mitchelson 2008; Brown 2009; Allsprach 2010; Lebaron and Roberts 2010; Beckett and Murakawa 2012; Hannah-Moffat and Lynch 2012; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2012; Moran, Piacentini, and Pallot 2012; Moran, Gill, and Conlon 2013; Kilgore 2015; Schept 2015; Shabazz 2015; Brown and Schept 2016; Story 2016). As such, this view analyzes relations between geographic patterns of urban crime and the increasingly prominent role that jails, prisons, police, postcustodial agencies, and security firms have in managing urban problems associated with poverty and abetting postindustrial redevelopment (Smith 1998; Western and Beckett 1999; MacLeod 2002; Peck 2003; Simon 2003; Vitale 2005; D. Wilson 2006; Clear 2007; Gilmore 2007; Peck and Theodore 2008; Wacquant 2008, 2009b). Building on these works, this article’s broader aim is to provoke greater discussion about the trenchant role that carceral governance has in clustering and escalating crime rates in inner-city contexts among urban planners. The objective is to contribute to debates about crime in planning circles by illustrating the generative role that carceral governance plays with respect to the ecological conditions that afflict high-crime neighborhoods.
This article is structured as follows. In the first section, I review the development of ecological analyses of urban crime in sociology and cognate disciplines. Here I place emphasis on the ways the ecological framework is linked to the conspicuous absence of the criminal justice system often in these works. In the second section, I review how these works have influenced urban planners studying crime, particularly with respect to the ecological themes characterizing planning scholarship and the relative absence of the criminal justice system. The third to sixth sections provide overviews of critical carceral studies, focusing on how it articulates relations between criminal justice institutions, the myriad forms of regulating criminalized populations, and urban geographies of crime. The seventh section builds on critical carceral research to explore how greater consideration of the carceral dimension helps enrich planning literature on the ecological conditions that characterize high-crime neighborhoods. Conclusion and discussion consider ways that critical carceral studies might be brought into closer dialogue with urban planning.
Urban Ecology and Crime: Formative Studies
The ecological framework has exerted inestimable influence on sociologists, criminologists, and even economists investigating urban crime, especially those who search for connections between crime and a range of social, economic, and physical factors embedded in the built environment. The attention paid to these three dimensions can be traced to Park (1915), who viewed geographic concentrations of urban crime as a product of the corrosive effects that urbanization has on community capacities to socialize youth. Park identified urbanization as a detriment to primary institutions of socialization (e.g., the household and church) and a driver of deviant subcultures characterizing gangs, vagabonds, and sex workers. Burgess’s concentric zone model expanded this perspective, as it ascribed high crime rates to an area’s land uses, ethnic composition, and rates of homeownership and population turnover (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925). Moreover, Shaw and McKay (1942) posited geographic distributions of youth delinquency as functions of social indicators in a study that is recognized as one of the “most fundamental sociological approaches to the study of crime and delinquency” (Sampson and Groves 1989, 774). Shaw and McKay argued high levels of juvenile delinquency emerges in areas with industrial physical types, which typically have low median income levels, ethnically diverse populations, and high population turnover. Groundbreaking as these works are, however, none conducted systematic analysis on how criminal justice policies and practices affected geographic distributions of delinquency and crime, leaving a lacuna that would persist in future scholarship.
This absence of the criminal justice system notwithstanding, early ecological studies have proven formative texts in leading sociological works on urban crime. In researching the social dimensions of crime, a range of scholars adopt Park’s emphasis on the importance of social controls (Nye 1958; Kelling and Wilson 1982; Kelling and Bratton 1998; Hirschi 2001). The central thrust in these studies is to find relationships between high-crime communities and the ability or willingness of their residents to control social disorder (e.g., antisocial behavior) or physical disorder (e.g., graffiti or litter). Whereas some of these focus on social controls in the domestic sphere (Nye 1958), other emphasize social controls in public spaces (Kelling and Wilson 1982). Nevertheless, both continue to draw upon Park’s (1915) work and view urban concentrations of crime as an outgrowth of degraded social controls.
The search for social underpinnings of urban crime has led many researchers to look for links between community structures and illegal social behaviors including drug abuse, crime, and violence (Leech 2012; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Sampson and Wilson 2005). The core question driving this research is why deviant social behaviors appear to thrive in disadvantaged urban areas. Sampson and Wilson (2005) argue that these areas are structurally disorganized (i.e., they lack adequate social networks) and as a consequence propagate systems of cultural disorganization in which disorder, crime, and drug abuse are normalized. But while they posit positive correlations between community crime rates and impoverishment, the extent to which these communities are corralled and confined by criminal justice agents is not systemically interrogated.
Sensitivities to this social dimension have given rise to inquiries into the relational links between social capital and geographic patterns of urban crime. Works at the forefront of this approach explore how neighborhood trust, reciprocity, information flows, and participation affect localized crime rates. Neighborhood crime levels are attributed to the presence or absence of these networks, as they enable communities to collectively tackle a local problem like crime (Sampson and Laub 1993; Drakulich 2015). Scholars using this approach ascribe crime in cities to the typically low levels of participation in neighborhood associations (Bowen and Bowen 1999; Simon, Crosby, and Dahlberg 1999). The anonymity and unfamiliarity between urban residents are also viewed as key to creating opportune conditions for criminals to act. Furthermore, social capital theorists emphasize the “collective efficacy” established through networks or the ability to collectively tackle local problems like crime and disorder. Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997) thus assert that social networks stimulate community cohesion and mutual trust needed for residents to organize against crime (see also Sampson and Raudenbush 1999).
Beyond the social dimensions of crime, the ecological emphasis on economic correlates of urban crime has also galvanized researchers. One such strand focuses on labor markets and analyzes relations between crime and processes of deindustrialization (W. J. Wilson 1997; Markusen 1985; Cronon 1991). W. J. Wilson (1997) chronicles Chicago’s rise of high-crime “ghetto census tracks” alongside the disappearance of manufacturing and construction jobs. For Wilson, neighborhoods afflicted by “high levels of joblessness, insufficient economic opportunities, and high residential mobility are unable to control the [compensatory] volatile drugs markets and the violent crimes related to it” (ibid., p. 21). Similarly, a number of scholars explore crime in city districts that still host manufacturing-based industries, particularly as cities transition to postindustrial economic systems (Piore and Sabel 1984; Saxenian 1994; Partridge and Rickman 2008; Wolman et al. 2008). Districts that have failed to make the leap to the postindustrial age are argued to attract low-income families who discourage high-skilled workers from moving to and developers from investing in these areas, which initiates cycles of disinvestment, poverty, and, ultimately, crime.
Home ownership and rent averages are both meticulously examined by researchers looking for correlations between housing markets and urban crime (Warner 1970; Berry 1976; Waddell, Berry, and Hoch 1993). This approach is salient among regional economists such as Waddell, Berry, and Hoch (1993), who map concentrations of urban crime alongside residential price gradients and segregated neighborhood submarkets. The combination of low-income black households and the reluctance of white homeowners to live near blacks is argued to foster clusters of depreciated housing, which in turn facilitates impoverished conditions that coincide with high-crime “ghetto expansion” (Berry 1976).
Shaw and McKay’s (1942) attention to relations between an area’s physical status and crime rates also deeply informs sociological and cognate literatures. At the center of these are investigations into how the physical layout of housing units and communal spaces affects ability of residents to monitor criminal activity. Jacobs’s (1961) work is foundational to this approach in its musings on relations between informal surveillance and crime. Newman (1972) and Newman, Institute for Community Design Analysis, and Center for Urban Policy Research (1996) used Jacobs’s insights to develop “defensible space theory,” which examined how architectural design might inhibit criminal activity in neighborhood settings. Newman proposed designs that bolster natural surveillance and residential senses of “territorial control” over their living space, which are both regarded as crime preventative. These works catapulted the highly influential crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) movement (see Cozens and Love 2015). Similar to Newman, CPTED was introduced by Jeffery (1997, 33), who asserted that environmental design could prove the most effective means of preventing crime, as a “crime has to be first committed before the [criminal justice] system is activated.” Against reactive and retributive forms of crime control characterizing the criminal justice system, he proposes a preventative model that addresses the ways criminal agents engage physical environments. But while Jeffery illustrates how the criminal justice system is relatively ineffective in preventing crime, he does not explore how it is complicit in producing crime.
Urban Ecology and Crime in Planning Research
Since the 1970s, a wide range of urban planners who study crime have drawn on the ecological framework to analyze crime in cities and devise solutions for reducing it (for a comprehensive review, see Chapple 2001). Like leading sociological works, planners also hone in on the social, economic, and physical structures that appear correlated with crime. But like the studies chronicled in the previous section, the overwhelming focus placed on these three dimensions by planners has allowed the criminal justice system to escape scrutiny, leaving a key variable affecting urban crime patterns unexplored.
The social dimensions of urban crime have captivated planners who view it as an effect of disparate social values and deviant subcultures nested inside inner-city neighborhoods (Gold 1970; Mayer 1972; Ganapati 2008; Jabareen and Zilberman 2016). A key point of emphasis in these works is the relation between shared senses of community and crime rates, particularly the negative correlation between the two (Potter and Cantarero 2006). In this view, urban factors such as high levels of anonymity, isolation, and mobility militate against the development of robust social bonds, creating conditions for illegal antisocial behaviors to flourish. A range of social values that are believed to characterize high-crime areas also intrigue some planners (Briggs 1997; Goetz 2012). Here the formation of criminogenic subcultures is attributed to lack of middle-class households and values, which are regarded as informal checks on antisocial and criminal behavior.
Focus on relations between entrenched social values and crime rates has prompted several planners to devise policies aimed to expose residents of high-crime communities to suburban job markets and middle-class environments. For some, improving public transportation and increasing car ownership is viewed as a means of deconcentrating deviant social formations (Briggs 1997; Orr et al. 2003; Varady and Walker 2003; Stewart 2011; Goetz 2012; Pfeiffer 2012; Lens 2013). Planners thus devise moving to opportunity (MTO) experiments involving housing vouchers for disadvantaged families in high-crime communities to diminish their exposure to crime-inducing local conditions and increase contacts with stable environments with better job opportunities. But while MTO advocates focus on the different socioeconomic opportunities that distinguish disadvantaged from middle-class areas, the differential exposure to criminal justice agents distinguishing these areas is not addressed.
Planners seeking to understand the social dimensions embedded in crime patterns also use social capital theory (see Putnam et al. 2004). Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) explore ways of mobilizing networks and resources in troubled neighborhoods to defeat urban decay and crime. Marshaling assets in these communities is viewed as necessary in order to build the vibrant local networks that can overcome crime, dysfunction, and welfare dependency. By forging networks of activists, businesses, and local institutions, they assert communities mired in crime can also attract outside investors to help revitalize their community. Rohe (2004) thus develops a model for reducing crime and underdevelopment by increasing civic engagement, interpersonal trust, and collective action. Other planners taking the social capital approach explore ways to reduce crime in disadvantaged neighborhoods by fostering stronger networks between them and external funders. These works lay stress on creating “boundary-spanning” (Briggs 2004) relations between these communities and outside organizations. Gittell and Vidal (1998) examine “indigenous redevelopment” models to bring residents of high-crime communities and businesses together to revitalize high-crime neighborhoods. In specific, they investigate how neighborhood networks and funding agencies can work in tandem to spark the interpersonal trust among residents in these neighborhoods so vital to informal modes of crime control.
In addition to social dimensions of crime, urban planners have generated a robust literature that focuses on the economic dynamics at work in urban crime rates. In the vein of W. J. Wilson’s oeuvre, planners have come to view crime as a function of the dwindling job opportunities and relative scarcity of businesses located in high-crime neighborhoods (Cervero, Sandoval, and Landis 2002; Galster, Hayes, and Johnson 2005; Fan 2012). Here, the flight of manufacturing industries in particular is viewed as a positive correlate of crime, prompting planners to uncover links between crime and neighborhood access to employment centers (Quercia and Galster 2000; Hoyt 2005; Fan 2012; Lens 2013). On the flip side, Stegman and Turner (1996) argue that central city violence in the 1980s and 1990s drove emerging industries out of cities, which diminished job opportunities for people living in urban cores. This view emphasizes that the flight of businesses and the professional class from center core areas diminished tax revenues, which in turn reduced educational funding so crucial to the postindustrial job market. As a result, central city neighborhoods came to be characterized by an unemployable labor supply compelled to compete in declining industrial labor markets, thereby turning many who remained to criminal markets for income, such as the drug trade or sex work.
This attention to the economic dimensions affecting crime trends has also prompted planners to explore relations between property values, housing, and violence. Some attribute urban “hotbeds of violence” near low-income public housing to depreciated housing and land values (Griffiths and Tita 2009). Urban blight, property devaluation, and the overrepresentation of low-income households are argued to collectively create neighborhood conditions ripe for crime (Freeman and Botein 2002; Goetz 2003; Galster 2005). Several planners thus advocate crime prevention through mixed-use developments and different mechanisms to prevent foreclosures (Smith 2002). Similarly, planners influenced by Newman argue that crime-afflicted public housing depreciates property values in surrounding neighborhoods and sets into motion cycles of disinvestment, poverty, and crime (see Lens 2013). Since the early 1990s, urban planners have thus worked with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to deconcentrate crime-torn, large-scale subsidized housing complexes. Planners also encourage improving conditions around high-crime public housing by transforming brownfields, obsolete infrastructure, and vacant lots into value-creating entertainment complexes, lofts, and waterfronts (Howland 2007).
The affect that physical environments have on crime in cities has similarly captured the attention of planners (Joh, Nguyen, and Boarnet 2012; Loukaitou-Sideris 2006; Loukaitou-Sideris et al. 2001; Cozens and Love 2015; Jabareen and Zilberman 2016). While relations between the physical structures of urban environments and crime have been contested by planners, several new movements including new urbanism, neotraditionalism, and transit-oriented development have reinvigorated interest in how physical planning may stem antisocial behaviors (see Jabareen and Zilberman 2016). Thus, on the one hand, various planners embrace CPTED approach to explore how architectural design, street design, subdivision regulations, and zoning ordinances affect the ability of residents to perform informal surveillance and social controls and thereby deter crime (Gardiner 1978; Crowe and Zahm 1994). Moreover, studies have shown a propensity for crime to cluster around public transportation stops (Loukaitou-Sideris, Liggett, and Iseki 2002; Loukaitou-Sideris 1999; Joh, Nguyen, and Boarnet 2012), advancing understandings on how physical structures intersect with crime patterns. This approach adds additional depth to a century ecological research on crime, which has evolved into a broad and variegated model to explore crime through (see Table 1 for review). But while planners provide nuance to the ecological model, they nevertheless leave the role that the criminal justice system has in shaping crime patterns widely unexamined.
Causes of Urban Crime and Policy Recommendations in Ecological Research.
Note: MTO = moving to opportunity; CPTED = crime prevention through environmental design; FEA= functional economic areas.
Defining Critical Carceral Studies
The subfield of critical carceral studies provides ample literature for examining how the structure of criminal justice institutions affects geographic patterns in urban crime. Distancing itself from bureaucratic perspectives on criminal justice that ascribe carceral control exclusively to correctional agencies, critical carceral studies are distinguished by an emphasis on the fact that the sites in which criminal justice institutions capture and confine criminalized subjects is not reducible to prisons and jails (Armstrong 2002; Peck 2003; Martin and Mitchelson 2008; Peck and Theodore 2008; Brown 2009; Allsprach 2010; Lebaron and Roberts 2010; Beckett and Murakawa 2012; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2012; Hannah-Moffat and Lynch 2012; Hallett 2012; Moran, Piacentini, and Pallot 2012; Moran 2013, 2014; Schept 2013, 2015; Kilgore 2015; Mountz and Loyd 2014; Jefferson 2015; Shabazz 2015; Brown and Schept 2016; Story 2016). From this perspective, reducing our understanding of carcerality to corrections severely limits knowledge concerning the extent to which the carceral state penetrates everyday life and plays a part in organizing geographies of crime, impoverishment, and race. Thus, on one hand, rejecting taken for granted boundaries of criminal justice control, critical carceral studies chronicle how prison-like conditions increasingly permeate national borders (Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2012; Mountz et al. 2012), group homes (Armstrong 2002), low-income public housing (Shabazz 2009; Tang 2015), low-income and racialized neighborhoods (Wacquant 2009b; Jefferson 2015), public schools (Sojoyner 2016), and upscale urban centers (Beckett and Herbert 2011; Becker and Müller 2012) to name a few places. On the other hand, this research places emphasis on the variegated categories of people whose mobility is inhibited by criminal justice institutions including, but not limited to, the chemically addicted (Wacquant 2009b; Brown and Schept 2016), homeless (Mitchell 1997), mentally ill (Beckett and Herbert 2011), negatively racialized (Alexander 2012), physically disabled (Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014), undocumented (Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2012; Moran, Gill, and Conlon 2013; Mountz and Loyd 2014), and visibly indigent (Vitale and Jefferson 2016). Widespread practices of criminalization and control of these groups collectively form what is commonly called carceral governance, which is quite prominent in urban contexts.
One intervention among these works is to cast into relief how recent transformations in carceral governance have affected geographic distributions of crime in cities. A central insight in this literature is drawn from Turk (1969), who demonstrated how crime data do not reveal much about high-crime communities so much as it unveils “the nature of normative structures and the behavior patterns of those who invent, modify and enforce norms” (p. 9). Consequently, carceral governance itself is treated by critical carceral scholars as an independent variable affecting geographic distributions of crime, which in turn opens up a research trajectory that goes beyond the three dimensions emphasized in the ecological perspective.
Placing the carceral dimension front and center, the works above focus on three ways recent mutations in carceral governance have helped to concentrate crime in cities. These include the intensification of criminal justice policies and practices, criminal justice institutions’ new role in managing social problems, and the critical role these institutions play in urban redevelopment (see Figure 1). Moreover, this literature has made alarming discoveries: these transformations in carceral governance generate a host of labor market problems, aggravate social disorganization, and erode social capital in high-crime metropolitan neighborhoods. Critical carceral studies thus demonstrate that the overreliance on criminalizing individuals and constricting their mobility that characterizes urban governances is pivotal in constituting many of the ecological problems chronicled by sociological and planning studies on urban crime.
Model of inner-city crime causation in critical carceral studies.
Intensifying Criminal Justice Policies and Practices
Extending analysis beyond the social, economic, and physical dimensions of neighborhoods, critical carceral scholars trace rising crime rates in disadvantaged areas to intensifications in criminal justice policies and practices (Beckett 1999; Clear 2007; Wacquant 2008; Alexander 2012). Here focus is placed on changes in the magnitude and scope of criminal justice activity during the past forty-five years and how it has inflated crime statistics in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods. While intensive and invasive criminal justice practices in black communities are traced back to the postbellum Black Codes in the south, they began to gain traction on a national scale circa Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign promises to secure urban “streets from bullies and marauders,” that is, civil rights protesters (Murakawa 2008). But it wasn’t until President Nixon’s 1971 declaration of war on drugs that the criminal justice system was codified as the state’s leading control mechanism for social problems ailing black urban communities (Parenti 2008; Alexander 2012). Since the war on drugs, high inner-city crime rates have been partially a result of the fact that city administrations have taken to “governing through crime” (Simon 2003) and making the aggressive criminal justice administration the highest priority on their agenda (Beckett 1999; D. Wilson 2005; Wacquant 2009b).
A number of works chronicle how the increasing intensity and scope of penal and policing policies have affected spatial patterns in crime statistics over the past few decades (Gilmore 2007; Wacquant 2009b; Alexander 2012). These stress how federal and state penal codes were not only made harsher during the 1980s but also more precisely targeted at the racialized poor in cities (see Tonry 1996b; Beckett 1999; Petteruti and Walsh 2008; Murakawa 2014; Clear and Frost 2015). In particular, notions of social disorder in poor racialized communities were “defined up” 1 by city administrations during this phase. Public incivilities such as alcohol consumption, loud music, panhandling, sex work, and unlicensed vending became subject to intensified police scrutiny and heavier sanctions (Vitale 2005, 2008; Chronopolous 2011). In the 1990s, city administrations passed a range of “order maintenance” policies to establish greater control over public nuisances and vaguely defined disorderly conducts more common to low-income, minority neighborhoods (see Mitchell 1997; Beckett and Herbert 2011). As such, low-level drug dealers, drug users, homeless persons, and other “disorderly” individuals became targets for arrests throughout major US cities. This new style of labeling and spatially targeting disorder dramatically increased government apprehension of petty criminals in inner-city communities, thereby increasing the number of arrestees from these neighborhoods.
There is a broad consensus in this literature that urban black communities were at the center of the transformations in criminal justice policy and practice (Tonry 1996a; Beckett 1999; Western and Beckett 1999; Gilmore 2002; Peck 2003; D. Wilson 2005; Western 2006; Frampton, López, and Simon 2008; Parenti 2008; Wacquant 2009a; Alexander 2012). The wars on drugs and crime redoubled efforts to construe these communities as synonymous with crime in political rhetoric and news media (D. Wilson 2005; Wacquant 2009b), and their disproportionate crime rates reflect to some degree the selective targeting that characterizes criminal justice institutions. Beckett (1999) documents how crime rhetoric in political campaigns and news media in the 1980s framed crime in such a way to mobilize broad support for the punitive regulation of black urban neighborhoods. In the 1990s, selectively policing these neighborhoods continued, as their residents were commonly branded as “contaminants” to the economic and civic well-being of redeveloping cities and suburbs by city officials (D. Wilson 2006; Wacquant 2009b). Indeed, Wacquant, Slater, and Pereira (2014, p. 1274) document how tough on crime policies have stigmatized black neighborhoods to unprecedented levels and “foster[ed] the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state” (see also Wacquant 2007).
These developments proved central in inflating arrest statistics in black urban neighborhoods, which serve as bases for official crime index data (Mann 1993). While national data show the majority of people who use and sell illegal drugs are white, more than 75 percent of people convicted on drug charges are black or latinx (Manza and Uggen 2006). Between 1983 and 2000, black prison admissions for drug crimes increased a perplexing twenty-six times over (Alexander 2012). The high drug arrest and crime rates in these communities are not outgrowths of neighborhood-based ecological factors so much as effects of changing penal policies, heightened police scrutiny (Anderson 1999), and systemic profiling (Harcourt 2006).
Beyond the intensity of criminal justice policies and practices, a number of researchers also document how the scope of carceral control also expanded during this period. Here, emphasis is directed toward the increasing amount of places in poor urban areas that are slowly but steadily being managed like quasi-prisons; that is, the mobility of inhabitants in these areas is increasingly controlled by agents of criminal justice institutions. Such places are manifold, including public housing complexes (Shabazz 2009; Tang 2015), public schools (Robbins 2005; H. Wilson 2014), and juvenile homes (Armstrong 2002). Moreover, scholars focusing on the pervasive scope of carceral administration in low-income, minority neighborhoods call attention to the increased use of surveillance cameras and “saturation patrols” (Jefferson 2015). What these works share in common is the recognition that through the carceral management of public spaces, urban minority youth come into contact at exponentially higher rates than the rest of the population and are thus bound to yield higher rates in arrests, citations, summonses, and the like. The differential crime rates in communities of poor, minority, urbanites are thus in part a consequence of the extraordinary scope with which they are monitored and managed by criminal justice personnel.
The Social Function of Carceral Governance
In addition to the intensification of criminal justice, critical carceral scholars draw attention to qualitative changes in the core functions of these institutions. Most notably, researchers highlight the criminal justice system’s increasing role in managing social problems related to urban poverty and unemployment (Western and Beckett 1999; Wacquant 2000, 2001; Western 2006; Gilmore 2007; Peck and Theodore 2008). These studies document how the replacement of social welfare policies with hyperaggressive penal and policing policies designed to regulate the unemployed and underemployed shape geographies of urban crime.
A central discovery in critical carceral studies is that disproportionate arrest rates in urban black neighborhoods are in large part consequences of structural changes in social policy and the way urban poverty is governed (Peck 2003; Peck and Theodore 2008; Vitale 2008; Wacquant 2008, 2009a). Rather than using subsidized housing, public employment, or social aid to manage urban poverty, city governments turned to zero tolerance and the quality of life policing policies in the early-1990s, which aggressively cracked down on low-level disorders and incivilities (Vitale 2005; Vitale and Jefferson 2016). Following this shift, panhandlers, unlicensed vendors, and indigent groups in cities are more apt to be managed by police and prisons than by social service agencies. Wacquant (2009a) thus observes the inverse relationships between Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) payments to single mothers and families of three and inmates in federal and state prisons beginning in the mid-1970s. This new “government of social insecurity” turns would-be welfare recipients into criminals, effectively boosting crime and arrest rates in low-income neighborhoods.
Correlations between unemployment and incarceration, opposed to those between unemployment and crime, are also investigated in this work (Western and Beckett 1999; Pettit and Western 2004; Peck and Theodore 2008; Wacquant 2008). These connections are particularly problematic for ex-convicts who not only encounter physical barriers to employment but also face formal and informal barriers to regular work. Formally, various states restrict formerly incarcerated people from obtaining driver’s licenses, thereby encumbering work commutes and virtually locking ex-convicts out of expanding service sectors (Combessie 2002; Levine 2010). Felony records in many instances legally disqualify persons from a variety of occupations including electrician, barber, mechanic, and other jobs demanding the few skills that can be honed during imprisonment (Mauer 2005; Clear 2007).
To compound matters, informal employer bias against hiring applicants with criminal records and those who reside in high-crime neighborhoods also form barriers to steady employment (Boshier and Johnson 1974; Holzer, Raphael, and Stoll 2004; Pager 2003). This also has the effect of funneling the underemployed and formerly convicted into illicit labor markets. The indelible stigma from criminal records effectively close off access to primary labor markets offering good pay, career paths, and age-graded pay scales (Western 2006). This is compounded by broader transformations in labor markets, most notably the rise of technical and white-collar jobs. As prison stints restrict work experience and retard skill development, formerly incarcerated persons find themselves ill-equipped to compete in knowledge-based labor markets. Also, in addition to negative assumptions about the character of ex-convicts, the added costs of adequately training ex-prisoners for information-based labor discourage employers from considering ex-their job applications (Peck and Theodore 2008). Moreover, postcorrectional supervision of formerly incarcerated persons including mandatory meetings with probation officers, house arrests, and electronic monitoring all inhibit the ability to search for and acquire work in redeveloped downtown areas (Kilgore 2015). These roadblocks push many formerly incarcerated men toward gang-controlled drug markets located in high-crime communities, escalating the rates of drug crime (Venkatesh 1997; Wacquant 2008; Hagedorn 2009).
Carceral Governance and Urban Redevelopment
Critical carceral scholars also chronicle how urban redevelopment projects in the 1990s played a vital role in inflating crime statistics in marginalized communities (Davis 1992; Smith 1998, 2001; Mitchell 2003; Beckett and Herbert 2011). This literature underscores how crime control policies during this time were devised to criminalize “undesirable” populations and remove them from the urban core, so as to accommodate large-scale redevelopment projects, gentrifiers, and high-end consumers. At the same time, crime control tactics used during this period also had the effect of restricting the criminalized poor’s mobility on the outskirts of cities (Smith 2001; Parenti 2008; Jefferson 2015). Taken together, the degree to city policy makers and redevelopers rely on crime control to abet redevelopment has contributed to criminalizing and removing undesirable populations from the urban core, actively concentrating them in peripheral neighborhoods, and thereby reshaping urban geographies of disorder and crime.
A variety of studies document how city governances used penal and policing policy to criminalize unwanted persons situated in redeveloping urban centers (Mitchell 1997; Smith 1998; Belina and Helms 2001; MacLeod 2002; Vitale 2005; Beckett and Herbert 2011; Chronopolous 2011; Becker and Müller 2012; Walby and Lippert 2012; Griffin 2013). Tracing changes in the way urban centers were policed in the 1990s, researchers emphasize that visible indigence threatens city efforts to attract outside investment, tourists, and high-end consumers. As such, cities devised a series of “quality of life” and “zero tolerance” crime control policies that levied heavy penalties on homeless encamping, begging near ATM machines, and various forms of panhandling and unlicensed vending (Vitale 2008; Walby and Lippert 2012).
In addition to criminalizing indigent people in the city core, crime control policies used to abet redevelopment drove them out of center city areas (Beckett and Herbert 2011). Smith (1998, 2001) chronicles how New York City used policing policy in the mid-1990s to expel unwanted persons from downtown and central Manhattan or control location with greater rigor. During this period, police conducted large-scale roundups and expulsions of homeless persons, truants, and sex workers from the city core so as to entice corporations and shoppers to frequent these areas (see also Chronopolous 2011; Beckett and Herbert 2011). Geographer Don Mitchell (1997) similarly chronicles waves of antihomeless law in the early-1990s across cities endeavoring to “go global.” This period witnessed a slew of policies against begging, panhandling, sleeping in public, loitering, and a range of fundamental human behaviors (urinating, defecating, washing, and eating) in public unavoidable for homeless persons. The result was a mixture of removing large portions of homeless people from center city areas and/or regulating their movements with greater efficacy.
The 1990s also witnessed urban crime control policies that restricted the mobility of criminalized undesirables in peripheral neighborhoods. For instance, crime control efforts in Los Angeles during this period employed a wide range of policing tactics such as checkpoints in public housing units and residential curfews that truncated the mobility of residents in high-crime neighborhoods (Davis 1990). Thus, the emerging subfield of “transcarceral geography” investigates how urban crime control efforts increasingly relegate ex-convicts to peripheral urban spaces (Allsprach 2010; Moran, Piacentini, and Pallot 2012; Moran 2013, 2014). This scholarship elucidates how parole regulations, electronic monitoring, and house arrests all factor into restricting the movement of parolees and probationers. These groups are increasingly subject to stipulations restricting how far they may travel from their place of residence and required to wear electronic GPS tracking devices lest they wander beyond certain boundaries (Paterson 2007; Yeh 2010; Gill 2013). A net result is the spatial concentration of criminal classes, which is reflected in the crime data observed by urban ecologists.
The Carceral Construction of High-crime Ecologies
By directing inquiry to the ways that the criminal justice institution drives crime rates up in select neighborhoods, critical carceral studies underscore an especially unfortunate irony: the criminal justice system itself produces the crime-inducing conditions that planners seek to redress. Specifically, the expansive nature of caceral administration plays a central role in exacerbating unemployment rates among low-skilled workers, engendering social disorganization, and overextending social capital in high-crime, disadvantaged neighborhoods. These findings are especially important for planners whose work seeks to ameliorate the social and economic problems besetting high-crime neighborhoods. This section explores each deleterious effect of carceral governance in turn.
In a seminal study, Western (2006) illustrates how mass imprisonment policies dramatically exacerbate unemployment in communities racked with high crime rates. Western’s key insight is urban penal policy acts as a “labor market institution” that creates the same underemployed and unemployed population it targets for criminalization (see also Offner and Holzer 2002; Peck and Theodore 2008). Western recalculates official employment statistics on the ratio of white to black male hourly wages by including nonworkers and prison and jail inmates in the 1980s and 1990s. This adjustment shows that by 1999, the prison boom corresponded with a gaping 45 percent difference in hourly wages between black and white men. Moreover, the wage increases exponentially with education. This has especially detrimental effects on hourly wages for incarcerated black male high school dropouts, who make 36 percent less than incarcerated white male high school dropouts, 52 percent less than black male workers with some college, and 166 percent less than white male workers with some college. Western’s analysis of black and latinx men who’ve served prison and jail time between 1979 and 2000 revealed income losses so significant that they increased total black and latinx male poverty by 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
Penal policies have moreover engendered and exacerbated social urban disorganization, especially in black communities. This is particularly salient in heterosexual nuclear families. Romantic partners of incarcerated men are inclined to use much of their limited resources on collect calls to prisons, attorney fees, and travel to and from prisons (Clear 2007). The economic and emotional strain engendered by the incarceration of men wears existing relationships thin, accelerates divorce rates, and decreases the likelihood that fathers will live with their children (Western and Lopoo 2006). The consequence is a dramatic rise in households headed by single working mothers, who are unable to provide informal social controls on children due to increased breadwinning responsibilities. Frost (2006) documents how such enhanced economic burden pushes many women to participate in the illicit drug economy and increases chances that their children will become wards of the state (see too Davis 2003, chapter 4).
The disorganizing effect that carceral governance has on children is profound. Indeed, children with an incarcerated parent are more likely to drop out of school, which increases substantially the likelihood they’ll engage in criminal activity. Black high school dropouts are fifty times more likely to be incarcerated at some point than the average American (Western 2006). This is compounded by the fact that many public schools in high-crime communities are also subject to heightened police scrutiny, which increases the chances that inner-city students attain criminal records (Sojoyner 2016). In fact, this resort to using police departments to enforce disciplinary codes renders some common student misbehaviors punishable by arrest (ibid.). Public schools in inner-city areas have thus developed close connections with prison system, giving rise to what is commonly termed the “school-to-prison pipeline” (Kim, Losen, and Hewitt 2012).
The prodigious rise of carceral control has also imposed negative consequences on the social networks and economic health of targeted neighborhoods. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, 16) demonstrates that imprisonment can overextend social capital in low-income neighborhoods by wrenching prisoners from communities for long bouts of time and consuming the precious time of prisoner families who are compelled to travel from “neighborhood to visiting room to courtroom.” Echoing Robert Park, Gilmore asserts that the rise of carceral governance in many cases induces residents of high-crime communities to rely more heavily on formal social control mechanisms (police, courts, prisons), which in turn may hasten the atrophy of informal social networks that usually control local deviance. To complicate things, property values depreciate once an area acquires penal opprobrium, and homeowners seeking to move are compelled to sell their houses at reduced prices (Clear 2007; Peck and Theodore 2001, 2008; Bonds 2013). Businesses realize that prospective customers are less likely to frequent stores in these places and avoid opening stores (which would need employees) in such areas (ibid.). This has the effect of dispersing social networks of professionals, who might prove helpful to formerly incarcerated persons
Implications for Planners
This article has attempted to trace the limitations of ecological perspectives on urban crime, especially with respect to the conspicuous absence of criminal justice institutions common to research adopting the ecological framework. Using the ecological approach, planners have produced rich and nuanced studies on the social, economic, and physical circumstances that beset high-crime neighborhoods. This scholarship has expanded and deepened the Chicago School’s original works, especially by providing detailed and grounded accounts of conditions within high-crime areas. But by relying overwhelmingly on the ecological model’s three-dimensional framework, planners have seldom placed the criminal justice system itself under analysis. The present article’s wider purpose is thus to provoke greater discussion in planning circles about the rise of carceral governance and the way it drives crime rates up in disadvantaged urban areas.
Critical carceral studies demonstrate that extreme concentrations of urban crime are not merely functions of neighborhood socioeconomic and physical characteristics but also a product of governing styles that privilege the use of carceral controls for a range of problems in cities. It demonstrates the disastrous effects that intensifying criminal justice policies and practices, tasking them with managing social problems, and using them to abet urban redevelopment have all had in low-income black communities. Moreover, these works elucidate how crime and drug policies sweeping the nation in the 1980s bar poor urban black access to primary labor markets, disintegrate community bonds and resources, and spatially concentrate indigent persons and households in ghettoized neighborhoods. Any comprehensive approach to deconcentrating urban clusters of crime requires addressing this carceral dimension of the problem.
Fortunately, the carceral works reviewed in this article offer an excellent companion to existing scholarship in advocacy and equity planning (Metzger 1996; Briggs 2005; Varady 2005; Ryan 2012; McKee and Muir 2013). These strands of planning focus on mobilizing public opinion, representing the working poor, and working within policy circles makes them ideal sites to introduce carcerality to urban debates about crime. First, due in no small part to critical carceral studies, public debates about race, discrimination, and criminal justice have reached levels not seen in a half century in the United States. Advocacy planners looking to mobilize publics around the pernicious effects of carceral governance would find no shortage of interest as a consequence. Second, the attention to marginalized communities that characterizes equity planning could be built upon by engaging with urbanites who’ve been negatively affected by criminal justice institutions. Thirdly, the policy focus characterizing planning has produced a wealth of knowledge about the inner workings of urban governments. These stocks of knowledge would prove vital assets in critically analyzing penal and policing policy and devising alternatives in their stead.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.