Research Note: Urban Expansion and the New Carceral Geography

The historically unprecedented rise in U.S. incarceration towards the end of the twentieth century was made possible through the construction of over 1,000 state and federal prisons. Both scholars and conventional wisdom characterize prisons as a predominantly rural institution. Often overlooked, however, is that the U.S. prison boom coincided with a period of rapid suburbanization. Integrating scholarship on prison proliferation and metropolitan reclassification, this paper asks: To what extent are prisons an urban phenomenon, and how has this changed over time? How has U.S. carceral geography evolved in the context of suburbanization? Drawing on spatial and administrative data, I show that the 1990s were distinct in rural prison siting patterns and that most U.S. prisons are now in metropolitan areas. Suburbanization further altered the metropolitan-rural distribution of prisons: 38 percent of metropolitan prisons are in formerly rural counties. Ultimately, I argue that prisons are important metropolitan institutions that warrant more attention from urban and suburban scholars. The U.S. prison boom is not only a rural economic development story but also a spatial process shaped by, and possibly reshaping, suburbanization.