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Several new studies suggest that social and spatial incarceration of young males has become part of the developmental ecology of adolescence in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. This concentration began in the 1970s, and has grown steadily through the last quarter century.The story of young men such as Cesar in Random Family illustrates the pervasive effects of both direct and vicarious prison experiences for young men and women in poor neighborhoods. Studies of street life such as Random Family, Code of the Streets, and American Project show how these experiences are now internalized in the social and psychological fabric of neighborhood life, a constant reality in the background of childhood socialization, and an everyday contingency for young men as they navigate the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Some studies show that within neighborhoods, incarceration leads to more incarceration over time in a spiraling dynamic. Other recent studies show that the risks of going to jail or prison grow over time for persons living in poor neighborhoods, contributing to the accumulation of social and economic adversity for people living in these areas, and depreciating the overall well being of the neighborhood itself.

The social concentration of incarceration among non-whites is a recurring theme in criminal justice research and legal scholarship. Despite robust evidence of its social concentration, few studies have examined its spatial concentration, or the effects of spatially concentrated incarceration over time on individuals and social areas. In this article, we examine the growth and spatial concentration of incarceration in police precincts and smaller homogeneous neighborhoods in New York City from 1985-96. We show that rates of incarceration spiked sharply after 1985 as crime rates rose. Higher incarceration rates persisted through the 1990s, and declined far more slowly after 1990 than did the sharply falling crime rates during the same period. We show that imprisonment rates are highest in the City's poorest neighborhoods and police precincts, although not necessarily the neighborhoods with the highest overall crime rates. We also show the perverse effects of incarceration on crime rates when analyzed at the precinct level: across the time series, higher incarceration rates predict higher crime rates one year later. We show that the growth of incarceration and its persistence over time are attributed primarily to two factors: drug enforcement and structured sentencing laws that mandate imprisonment for repeat felons. Neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration invite closer and more punitive police enforcement and parole surveillance, contributing to the growing number of repeat admissions and the resilience of incarceration even as crime rates fall. Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration. We discuss three mechanisms that contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family's ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

For decades, violence, drugs and public housing have been closely linked in political culture and popular imagination. In 1990, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) made funds available to public housing authorities to combat drug and crime problems. This program, the Drug Elimination Program (DEP) combined several strategies under one administrative umbrella: police enforcement, drug treatment, drug prevention, youth and gang outreach, community organizing, integrated health and social service agencies, and tenant mobilization projects. In New York, the Housing Authority spent $165 million on DEP in its 330 public housing sites between 1990 and 1996. Yet there has been little research on this large investment, either in New York City or nationwide. In this study, we examined the effects of the DEP intervention at three levels of complementary theoretical relevance: the public housing development itself, the neighborhood in which public housing is situated, and the police precinct that surrounds each public housing project. We used spatial analyses and hierarchical regressions to estimate DEP effects on drug and crime in public housing sites and their surrounding neighborhoods. We show that crime and drug problems were reduced significantly in the immediate neighborhoods and police precincts surrounding the public housing sites, but crime and drug problems in public housing sites were unaffected by DEP interventions. The absence of effects within public housing reflects the details of the DEP strategies, with its disproportionate allocation of funds to policing strategies compared to demand reduction and informal social control programs. DEP police efforts were nominally focused on public housing sites, but in reality were diffused in the NYPD's broader administrative units to provide resources that benefited law enforcement generally. Seen this way, DEP was an important and strategically valuable supplement to the NYPD's strategic response to a particularly acute violence and crime epidemic, but did little to alter the basic social organization of crime and drugs within public housing sites. We argue for an intervention model that promotes collective action between residents and legal actors, interactions that promote citizen compliance and cooperation with police. The police depend heavily on the voluntary cooperation of citizens to fight crime, and DEP created disincentives for cooperation. This social norms approach would invite policing of drug problems in the context of a legitimacy-focused approach that promotes citizen-based regulation of crime and disorder.

This accessible text provides a comparative perspective on racism in Europe as experienced and exhibited by young people. It offers a clear analysis of the causes of racism and nationalism and examines public policies designed to have a positive effect.; This book is intended as a supplementary text for undergraduate and postgraduate students in social work, social policy, sociology and political science, and as an essential text for students on professional courses in youth and community work

In this authoritative volume, race and ethnicity are themselves considered as central organizing principles in why, how, where and by whom crimes are committed and enforced. The contributors argue that dimensions of race and ethnicity condition the very laws that make certain behaviors criminal, the perception of crime and those who are criminalized, the determination of who becomes a victim of crime under which circumstances, the responses to laws and crime that make some more likely to be defined as criminal, and the ways that individuals and communities are positioned and empowered to respond to crime.Contributors: Eric Baumer, Lydia Bean, Robert D. Crutchfield, Stacy De Coster, Kevin Drakulich, Jeffrey Fagan, John Hagan, Karen Heimer, Jan Holland, Diana Karafin, Lauren J. Krivo, Charis E. Kubrin, Gary LaFree, Toya Z. Like, Ramiro Martinez, Jr., Ross L. Matsueda, Jody Miller, Amie L. Nielsen, Robert O'Brien, Ruth D. Peterson, Alex R. Piquero, Doris Marie Provine, Nancy Rodriguez, Wenona Rymond-Richmond, Robert J. Sampson, Carla Shedd, Elizabeth Trejos-Castillo, Avelardo Valdez, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, María B. Vélez, Geoff K. Ward, Valerie West, Vernetta Young, Marjorie S. Zatz