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http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01dj52w791m| Title: | Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Virginia |
| Contributors: | Widra, Emily Gilliam, Kenneth |
| Keywords: | Prisons—Virginia—Statistics Mass incarceration—Virginia |
| Issue Date: | Jul-2022 |
| Publisher: | Prison Policy Initiative |
| Place of Publication: | Northampton, MA |
| Description: | One of the most important criminal legal system disparities in Virginia has long been difficult to decipher: Which communities throughout the state do incarcerated people come from? Anyone who lives in or works within heavily policed and incarcerated communities intuitively knows that certain neighborhoods disproportionately experience incarceration. But data have never been available to quantify how many people from each community are imprisoned with any real precision. But now, thanks to redistricting reform that ensures incarcerated people are counted correctly in the legislative districts they come from, we can understand the geography of incarceration in Virginia. Virginia is one of eleven states that have formally ended prison gerrymandering (while another three states have addressed the practice through their state redistricting commissions), and now count incarcerated people where they legally reside — at their home address — rather than in remote prison cells. This type of reform, as we often discuss, is crucial for ending the siphoning of political power from disproportionately Black and Latino communities, to pad out the mostly rural, predominantly white regions where prisons are located. And when reforms like Virginia’s are implemented, they bring along a convenient side effect: In order to correctly represent each community’s population counts, states must collect detailed state-wide data on where imprisoned people call home, which is otherwise impossible to access. Using this redistricting data, we found that in Virginia, some of the state’s largest cities — Norfolk and Richmond — are sending the highest numbers of people to prison, but it is smaller cities — like Martinsville, Petersburg, Franklin — and less populous counties — including Buchanan, Lee, Dickenson, and Brunswick counties — that are missing a larger share of their population to incarceration. And a deeper dive into the data shows that even within cities there are dramatic differences in rates of incarceration between neighborhoods, often along racial and socioeconomic lines. These data show that — big or small — every community in Virginia is harmed by mass incarceration |
| URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01dj52w791m |
| Related resource: | https://www.prisonpolicy.org/origin/va/2020/report.html |
| Appears in Collections: | Monographic reports and papers (Publicly Accessible) |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WherePeopleInPrisonComeFromVirginia.pdf | 2.16 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Download |
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