This is what I got on hyper ghetto
Classic notions of the “peculiar institution” of racism involve white dominance over blacks. Most view the carceral state or prison industrial complex extending the “peculiar institution” of racism as an oppressive catalyst generating jobs, capital investments, political power, and community pride in white rural prison towns. While there is some speculation, there is even less scholarship offered to understand the relationship between the prison and rural America. Research to date would lead us to believe prison populations are mostly black and brown and new facilities are sited in rural towns than majority white with sizeable proportions of poverty and unemployment. I will explore if the demographics of newly constructed prisons during the prison/incarceration boom are consistent with current prison town literature. Therefore, non-urban prison sitings during the prison boom will be analyzed using standard logistic regression, multi-level logistic modeling (to account for variation across state and region), and rare event logit analysis to investigate the probability of a prison being constructed in a given small rural town. The two central questions of this research are: 1.) What is the probability of a given region/state building a prison in a town? 2.) What are the demographic characteristics of communities that receive prisons?
In contrast to popular conceptions of prison towns having poor white residents with blacks and browns inhabiting the prison, I find penal institutions are more likely to be erected in rural towns that black, Hispanic, and impoverished. I conclude that the probability of constructing a prison increases with the proportion of a town’s poverty, black and Hispanic populations, unemployment, and region. These findings challenge the current literature on prison towns and suggest a new theoretical model to investigate systems of inequality in the ripe space of the rural, black, south. The primary crux of this new model rests on the argument that the prison is not part of a “prison industrial complex”, but is a lens to understand the effects of acute disadvantaged on both ends of the urban rural penal spectrum.
Feb 16, 2011 @ 13:07:01
