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Traci Burch, ABF Research Faculty & Northwestern University- "The 'Neighborhood Effects' of Incarceration on Political Attitudes"

  • When: September 15, 2010, 12–1:30 pm
  • Where: Woods Conference Center, 750 N Lake Shore Drive, 4th Floor

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Traci Burch
ABF Research Faculty
Assistant Professor; Northwestern University, Department of Political Science

 

The 'Neighborhood Effects' of Incarceration on Political Attitudes

This research explores the relationship between neighborhood criminal justice involvement and individual political attitudes, particularly perceptions of discrimination and political efficacy.  The study combines individual-level data from The Saguaro Seminar’s 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg metro area with data on block groups obtained from the Census Bureau and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.  The key causal independent variable, neighborhood imprisonment rate, was obtained by geocoding offender addresses from the North Carolina Department of Correction.  The findings demonstrate that people who live in neighborhoods (defined as block groups) where more people have been sent to prison perceive more discrimination and feel less efficacious than people who live in neighborhoods with lower imprisonment rates, all other factors equal.  For instance, based on simulations, for a black female living in a neighborhood with a 2 percent adult incarceration rate, the probability of “agreeing” or “strongly agreeing” that “The people running my community do not really much care what happens to me” is 11 percentage points higher than that of a black female living in a neighborhood with only a 1 percent imprisonment rate.  Similarly, a black female who lives in a neighborhood with a 2 percent imprisonment rate is likely to respond that she “sometimes,” “often” or “very often” feels “people act as though they think you are dishonest” at a rate 6 percentage points higher than a black woman who lives in a neighborhood with only a 1 percent imprisonment rate.  These results hold even though the models control for individual-level factors such as race, age, ideology, gender and educational attainment and neighborhood-level factors such as poverty, crime, vacancy, and unemployment rates.


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