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http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01p2676z761| Title: | Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in New Jersey |
| Contributors: | Widra, Emily Patel, Henal Pierce, Ronald |
| Keywords: | Prisons—New Jersey—Statistics Mass incarceration—New Jersey |
| Issue Date: | Jun-2022 |
| Publisher: | Prison Policy Initiative |
| Place of Publication: | Northampton, MA |
| Description: | One of the most important criminal legal system disparities in New Jersey has long been difficult to decipher: Which communities 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 with any real precision how many people from each community are imprisoned. 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 New Jersey. New Jersey is one of over a dozen states that have ended prison gerrymandering, 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 New Jersey’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 New Jersey incarcerated people come from all over the state, but are disproportionately from a few specific cities, most notably Camden, Atlantic City, Paterson, Newark, and Jersey City. A deeper dive into the data shows that even within these cities there are dramatic differences in rates of incarceration between neighborhoods, often along racial and socioeconomic lines. Finally, the data shows that even in a state like New Jersey, with a predominantly urban population, many rural counties (including Cumberland, Salem, and Cape May counties) are disproportionately affected by incarceration. |
| URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01p2676z761 |
| Related resource: | https://www.prisonpolicy.org/origin/nj/2020/report.html |
| Appears in Collections: | Monographic reports and papers (Publicly Accessible) |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WherePeopleInPrisonComeFromNewJersey.pdf | 1.67 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Download |
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