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The Big House in a Small Town: Prisons, Communities, and Economics in Rural America
Abstract
This paper is about the nuts and bolts of local politics, something not studied enough in our discipline. Studies of politics and prisons at the higher levels of government abound, but very little has been done to understand these entities on the micro level. To just discuss the prison building boom writ large is to forget that these prisons are actually built in towns. Although some large cities may be able to absorb a large facility with very little impact on the community as a whole, this is not the case in a small rural community, where the prison population may equal the population of free citizens. This is a study of two of these new prison towns: Beeville, Texas and Florence Colorado. Both are small rural communities who began the lobbying process in the late 1980's. Beeville had fallen on hard economic times with the decline of the Texas oil boom and Florence, though never an economic hot spot, lost a significant number of jobs and residents with the decline of the mining industry. Both communities worked hard to land a facility, Beeville from the Texas Department of Corrections (now Texas Department of Criminal Justice or TDCJ) and Florence from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and both have since become the site of multiple facilities. They are both examples of the new rural prison towns that have cropped up all over the country over the past 25 years. This paper is a study of the institutional relationships that develop after the prison opens.
Criminologists who examine prison siting and proliferation often take two approaches. On one hand, researchers explore citizens’ perceptions of prison siting in their community. Alternatively, they unpack consequences a prison brings to a region—often with attention toward whether they fuel economic growth. This discussion occasionally invokes the concept environmental sociologists commonly used to examine environmental injustices: LULUs (locally undesirable land uses). However, criminologists have not drawn on this concept to consider how environmental contamination and prison proliferation dovetail in the context of mass incarceration. Relatedly, environmental justice scholars have begun to suggest that prisons are rife with environmental justice issues that scholars in that subdiscipline should take seriously. Here, we draw these subfields into conversation with one another, as we see several important synergies. In particular, we heed Eason's (2017, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) call for a more robust theoretical framework interrogating the causes and consequences of the prison boom by making a case that environmental justice work on LULUs provides criminology an opportunity to understand prison proliferation more critically. In turn, we make the case that environmental justice scholars have inroads into the study of mass incarceration—especially as it relates to prison proliferation.
Dynamically written and richly illustrated, the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology offers the first foundational primer on visual criminology. Spanning a variety of media and visual modes, this volume assembles established researchers whose work is essential to understanding the role of the visual in criminology and emergent thinkers whose work is taking visual criminology in new directions. This book is divided into five parts that each highlight a key aspect of visual criminology, exploring the diversity of methods, techniques and theoretical approaches currently shaping the field: Part I introduces formative positions in the developments of visual criminology and explores the different disciplines that have contributed to analysing images. Part II explores visual representations of crime across film, graphic art, documentary, police photography, press coverage and graffiti and urban aesthetics. Part III discusses the relationship of visual criminology to criminal justice institutions like policing, punishment and law. Part IV focuses on the distinctive ethical problems posed by the image, reflecting on the historical development, theoretical disputes and methodological issues involved. Part V identifies new frameworks and emergent perspectives and reflects upon the distinctive challenges and limits that can be seen in this emerging field. This book includes a vibrant colour plate section and over a hundred black and white images, breaking down the barriers between original photography and artwork, historic paintings and illustrations and modern comics and films. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, visual ethnographers, art historians and those engaged with media studies. © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
The article examines the processes involved in the integration of the USSR's secret places into mainstream rural society in the Russian Federation. Taking the example of one rural district in the Volga-Ural region that has been the site of a large prison complex over a period of ninety years, the article examines how economic changes and local government and penal reforms have eroded the boundary that marked off the penal region from the rural district in which it was located. Using interviews and social surveys conducted among the local population, the article examines the extent to which the opening of the penal sub-region has led to changes in the symbolic boundary between the communities in the rural raion. The article concludes that although new spaces of active government are being produced in rural Russia, these are not necessarily the basis for the emergence of new common identities among the people living in them.
This study of a highly successful minimum security state prison in southern Illinois suggests that establishing significant penal reforms, at least in open or community based correctional facilities, depends upon articulating the prison program with the economic, social and political systems of the local community in which the institution is lodged. Vienna Correctional Center was built initially due to the efforts of the local elite for whom a large state institution meant economic revival and the expansion of political patronage. The prison has grown and expanded its reform programs in novel directions by continuing to find ways to serve particular community interests. At a time when establishing community based facilities in urban communities is meeting strong opposition this case study points out that chances for success are highest in those situations where the prison can serve a functional role in the life of the community.
Socio-legal researchers increasingly recognise the need to employ a wide variety of methods in studying law and legal phenomena, and the need to be informed by an understanding of debates about theory and method in mainstream social science. The papers in this volume illustrate how a range of topics, including EU law, ombudsman, judges, lawyers, Shariah Councils and the quality assurance industry can be researched from a socio-legal perspective. The objective of the collection is to show how different methods can be used in researching law and legal phenomena, how methodological issues and debates in sociology are relevant to the study of law, and the importance of the debate between "structural" and "action" traditions in researching law. It also approaches the methodological problem of how the sociology of law can address the content of legal practice from a variety of perspectives and discusses the relationship between pure and applied research. The editors provide a critical introduction to each of the six sections, and a general introduction on law, sociology and method. The collection will provide an invaluable resource for socio-legal researchers, law school researchers and postgraduates.
: Casino gambling has experienced dramatic growth in the USA during the past seven years. Because this growth has occurred recently, there have been few systematic studies of its effects. This paper uses quasi-experimental control group methods to study 68 counties where casinos were opened during the period 1989-93 and three multi-casino counties. Results show that casino gambling is adopted by economically struggling counties and that it can be a successful development strategy. The effects trickle down to other sectors of the economy, including recipients of income maintenance payments. On the downside, local governments and local workers do not appear to reap the lion's share of benefits, as much of the income generated by casinos is dissipated through leakages outside the host county. Finally, some casino types and locations are marginally better than others, but currently these factors are not prominent determinants of casino effects. Acknowledgements: This research was supporte...
This article, after examining the evidence for the conventional wisdom that development policies are ineffective, reports the results of an empirical analysis of the effects of local policies on manufacturing growth in U.S. cities. In response to design difficulties in previous studies, the effects of local economic development policy on manufacturing activity for 212 cities wereestimated with a disequilibrium adjustment model. The results provide evidence that local policies have positive effects on capital investment but little effect on employment.
In their continued considerations of political inequality, urban scholars are especially concerned with less visible influences surrounding community decision making, and have employed such concepts as potential power, nondecision making, and anticipated reactions. However, these concepts leave some patterns of influence unexplained. There is also a dimension of power in which durable features of the socioeconomic system confer advantages and disadvantages on groups in ways that predispose public officials to favor some interests at the expense of others. Public officials make their decisions in a context in which strategically important resources are hierarchically arranged. Because this system of stratification leaves public officials situationally dependent on upper-strata interests, it is a factor in all that they do. Consequently, system features lower the opportunity costs of exerting influence for some groups and raise them for others. Thus socioeconomic inequalities put various strata on different political footings.
This article explores public attitudes toward the disenfranchisement of felons. Using survey research methods -- Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing of 503 randomly selected adults -- the authors posed questions related to the purpose of the criminal justice system, public attitudes about treatment and punishment of felons, and public support for the disenfranchisement of felons. The data is aggregated and sorted based on ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, and education. The data demonstrates that the American public does not support permanent disenfranchisement of convicted felons but that it does support some limitations. The authors first review state laws and legal/political issues implicated, then discuss their research, and finally propose future research focused on different policies within states and invite future scholarship in this area.
Community policing has become a popular approach. Discussions of community policing have focused on urban and suburban departments, generally ignoring rural and small town police organizations. Ironically, many of these departments have a history of practices that correspond directly to the principles of community policing. For example, officers in these agencies typically know the citizens personally, have frequent face-to-face contact with them, and engage in a variety of problem-solving activities that fall outside of law enforcement. In neglecting small town and rural police, researchers have denied themselves an important natural laboratory for studying community policing.
The current debate about corrections' privatization neglects the extensive overlap of business, political, and private interests that shapes public corrections policy. Based on current developments in the United States it is possible to identify a corrections-commercial complex. As Deep Throat reportedly said to Washington Post writer Bob Woodward in an underground parking garage after he and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Committee for the Re-election of the President's secret fund in 1972: “Follow the money.”
It is argued at the beginning of this article that positive relations between prison facility and community promote the quality of life of correctional staff, of inmates being reintegrated, and of noncorrectional community members. Then, a “status relations” framework is developed for understanding how prison siting practices affect relations between the prison and the community. Finally, the framework is applied to the siting of California state prisons, including the case of the siting of Pelican Bay State Prison in rural Del Norte County, California.
Most research on drug use and the drug industry in the United States has been done in urban areas. On a practical level, the neglect of rural areas is important because these areas (a) have problems with drug use, (b) are important in the transshipment of drugs across the country, and (c) are increasingly the sites for the production of synthetic drugs and marijuana. From a methodological and theoretical standpoint, the study of variability is the essence of the scientific approach. By excluding substantial rural-urban differences, the study of the drug industry is seriously handicapped. Research in rural areas presents a unique set of problems, however. This study examines research issues in the study of drugs in rural areas, drawing on the author's experiences in studying domestic marijuana production.
This research explores the role of the victim-offender relationship of prison inmates' commitment crimes in predicting violent offenders' behavior problems. The importance of the victim-offender relationship is supported by anecdotal accounts and theoretical reasoning which suggest that nonstranger offenders have fewer disciplinary problems in prison than stranger offenders. Inmate interviews and official data were collected from 273 violent offenders. Results suggest that inmates with more extensive rule-breaking behaviors are likely to be younger, less intelligent individuals who victimize strangers, have had more numerous juvenile convictions, and have served at least one prior prison term. Conclusions and implications for public policy are discussed.
This article reviews arguments for and against the siting of a correctional facility in a community. Arguments for siting are usually based on the economic benefits for the community. However, the appeal of these benefits varies with different communities and among various groups in the communities. Opposition may result from many reasons: fear of escapes, decline in property values, prisoners' families, quality-of-life concerns, and feelings of inefficacy. Future siting will probably continue to take place near existing facilities and in small, economically depressed communities in which the economic benefits of the siting can make the most difference.
Research studies find that the objective impacts of prisons on their host communities are largely favorable. At the same time, residents of these communities often hold unfavorable attitudes toward their prison and community relationships with the institution may be poor. Using examples from an in-depth study of a new prison in a small town, one source of this disparity is sought in usual practices that would be found elsewhere as well. Corrections/community relations are likely to be influenced by the processes involved in prison siting and operations, and by differences in the premises underlying the judgments of local residents and corrections officials.
As a result of the dramatic increase in the prison population, correctional institutions have become the fastest growing public space in the United States (Zukin, 1995). Criminal justice practitioners and scholars continue to debate the utility of sentencing policies that have produced the demand for new prisons. Perhaps, though, the most unexpected result is the extent to which new correctional institutions are perceived as a means of reviving economically failing communities. As traditional “smokestack chasing” strategies of economic development have become less promising, community leaders are turning to new strategies. One strategy that appears to hold promise is the recruitment of new correctional facilities.
Particularly in rural communities that have suffered staggering losses in agriculture, mining, and other natural resource industries, prisons are rapidly becoming a popular alternative to more traditional means of economic development. Today, it is not uncommon for announcements of plans to construct new prisons to set off intense bidding wars as economically troubled towns vie with one another to be chosen as the prison site (Pagel, 1988; Fitchen, 1991; Meddis and Sharp, 1994; Hernandez, 1996).
This article presents a single case study of the economic impact of a correctional facility on its host community, a rural town in the Midwest. The study can advance the understanding of what happens when communities turn to prisons as an economic development strategy.
After several years of study of the sociological influences at work in a typical American state penitentiary of about 2,300 inmates it is concluded that "the prisoner's world is an atomized world. Its people are atoms acting in confusion. It is dominated and it submits. Its own community is without a well-established social structure. Recognized values produce a myriad of conflicting attitudes… There is no consensus for a common goal. The inmates' conflict with officialdom and opposition toward society is only slightly greater in degree than conflict and opposition among themselves. Trikery and dishonesty overshadow sympathy and coöperation. Such coöperation as exists is largely symbiotic in nature. Social controls are only partially effective… . Except for the few, there is bewilderment. No one knows, the dogmas and codes notwithstanding, exactly what is important… . While no effort has been made to compare the prison world with a non-penal community, certain broad similarities become evident. In a sense the prison culture reflects the American culture, for it is a culture within it." Prisonization, or the process of taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary, may so disrupt the prisoner's personality that a happy adjustment in any community becomes next to impossible. The methodologies used were case studies, statistical tabulations, autobiographies, and essays written by prisoners upon a variety of suggested topics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
James Madison contributed much to political science and to the art and science of governing democratic regimes. A major contribution was his recognition of the multiple threats facing the newly established Confederation (see, e.g., Dougherty 2001). Madison was willing to invest heavily in converting these threats into new opportunities. In his “Preface to Debates in the Convention” ([1984] 1840, 19), Madison reflected on the causes for alarm. James Madison Award lecture presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., September 1, 2005. The author is appreciative of support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation and useful comments by Bill Blomquist, Eric Coleman, Sue Crawford, Joshua P. Hill, Marco Janssen, Robert Keohane, Mike McGinnis, Lesa B. Morrison, Amy Poteete, Mike Schoon, David Schwab, and Kenneth Shepsle on an initial draft of this paper. As always, I deeply appreciate Patty Lezotte's careful editing.
This paper examines some of the central concerns expressed by residents over the presence of penal institutions within their community, and looks at some of the factors which may influence the type and intensity of those concerns. Using existing survey data collected in the lower Fraser Valley region of British Columbia, Canada, four generic factors of perceived impact are identified: concern for family safety; concern for general quality of life; concern for value of neighbourhood, and concern for neigh-bourhood instability. Three hypotheses are then examined, relating these four concerns to the respondents' history of victimization, physical proximity to the institutions, and current position in family life cycle.
Changes in economic and social well-being in three Alabama countries, immediately subsequent to the opening of large state prison facilities in those countries, are examined. Case study comparisons of prison and control (no prison) counties, using variables of population growth, total employment, per capita income, retail sales, property value, farm acreage and value, school enrollment, and crime rates and juvenile court cases, find some mixed indicators of a prison's effect on the local economy, but the majority of variables showed no negative effects, and positive improvement was found in some cases.
In this in-depth examination of community policing in Seattle, William T. Lyons, Jr. explores the complex issues associated with the establishment and operation of community policing, an increasingly popular method for organizing law enforcement in this country. Stories about community policing appeal to a nostalgic vision of traditional community life. Community policing carries with it the image of a safe community in which individual citizens and businesses are protected by police they know and who know them and their needs. However, it also carries an image of community based in partnerships that exclude the least advantaged, strengthen the police, and are limited to targeting those disorders feared by more powerful parts of the community and most amenable to intervention by professional law enforcement agencies. The author argues that the politics of community policing are found in the construction of competing and deeply contested stories about community and the police in environments characterized by power inbalances. Community policing, according to the author, colonizes community life, increasing the capacity of the police department to shield itself from criticism, while manifesting the potential for more democratic forms of social control as evidenced by police attention to individual rights and to impartial law enforcement. This book will be of interest to sociologists and political scientists interested in the study of community power and local politics as well as criminologists interested in the study of police. William T. Lyons, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Akron. He previously worked for the Seattle Police Department.
In Rules versus Relationships, John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr examine the experiences of litigants seeking redress of everyday difficulties through the small claims courts of the American legal system. The authors find two major and contrasting ways in which litigants formulate and express their problems in terms of specific rule violations and seek concrete legal remedies that would mend soured relationships and respond to their personal and social needs.
Thesis (Ed. D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1985. UMI #85-23,332. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
Thesis (M.S.)--University of Kentucky, 2001. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-103).
Crime and policing in rural and small town America
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Prisons and their effects on local economics: The Colorado experience
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Setti, C. 2001. Prisons and their effects on local economics: The Colorado experience. CPEC Center for Tax Policy Research of Denver 47: 271-291