Why Is Mass Incarceration Booming in the Rural U.S.?

Description

Jack Norton, senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, will give a talk titled "Why Is Mass Incarceration Booming in the Rural U.S.?" This talk will be geared toward undergraduate and graduate students, and all are welcome. It is co-sponsored by the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship and the Department of Political Science.

Norton's talk will discuss how local jail incarceration rates have been rising in small- and medium-sized counties across the country. Rural counties are driving nationwide increases in jail incarceration, even as major cities lock up fewer people. As county after county builds new and bigger jails, increased carceral capacity at the local level ties economic well-being to incarceration and immigrant detention.

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted over five years in twelve states, Norton will present an overview of county jail expansion in the rural U.S., examining how local political realignments have coalesced around jail construction and the criminalization of poverty. He will also discuss the role of the federal government and federal agencies—namely U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the U.S. Marshals—in fueling a 'carceral arms race' in rural counties and small cities across the country as well as the relevance of this shifting geography of incarceration for those organizing for decarceration and abolition.

All in-person events at Johns Hopkins must follow university COVID-19 policies. See current guidelines online.

At the Vera Institute of Justice, Jack Norton works on the In Our Backyards project studying criminalization and incarceration in rural counties and small cities across the U.S. His writing and photography has been published in outlets such as The Guardian, New York Review of Books, Spectre Magazine, Verso Books, and Jacobin. He has a Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences (geography specialization) from the CUNY Graduate Center, and he is currently writing a book about the rural prison boom in New York state during the 1980s and 1990s.