Variation in Livelihood, Socioeconomic, and Development Outcomes among Communities with Correctional Facilities

Communities rely on prisons and incarceration as standard criminal-justice responses. Small cities, towns, and rural communities adapting to major economic changes since the 1970s have increasingly leveraged the demand for correctional facilities as sources of new employment and growth opportunities. This project examines what sort of variation exists in the way prisons impact community cultural, social, political, and religious life.

It has been well established that the reliance on prisons has important socioeconomic impacts for neighboring regions, as norms and ideas circulate across traditional community borders. Less understood is how variation in prisons intersects with individual characteristics to affect livelihoods in prison towns and neighboring areas. This project uses cultural anthropological fieldwork methods to investigate the broad impacts of incarceration on contemporary society and individual livelihoods.

Investigating variation in prison factors such as their age, security level, and inmate population, in conjunction with data on surrounding community cultures and livelihoods, this comparative study provides insights that inform public officials and residents at local, state, and national levels to understand the specific ways that prisons shape culture, religion, society, and politics outside prison walls, informing rehabilitation efforts in marginalized communities. The project trains numerous undergraduate and graduate assistants in scientific data collection and analysis methods.

Through a broad comparison of prison and non-prison towns, this project investigates the specific ways by which local cultures and institutions shape local livelihoods and understandings of prisons in prison towns and more widely. Specifically, the investigators are conducting collaborative ethnographic research through participant observation, interviews, life histories, and document analysis.

Their research focuses on a range of towns housing prisons in a region with 35 prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and immigration detention facilities within a two-hour radius, including prisons that are significant to the history of incarceration. The research focuses attention on the interface between prison and everyday life, and therefore provides empirical evidence of how, both as brick-and-mortar institutions and as a set of ideas, prisons shape how people understand and experience diverse notions of law and politics, including community, citizenship, justice, and accountability.

The project thereby merges theory in law and science with anthropological ideas to generate a more nuanced, community-centered set of insights that seek to specify how individuals, embedded within diverse communities, create and transmit meanings relevant to carceral life.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.