Gender and incarceration as coercive mobility: a theoretical model of effects on women’s forms of capital and informal social control

ABSTRACT

Previous work has theorized that the removal of residents due to incarceration, known as coercive mobility, contributes to disruptions in neighboring relationships and therefore, impedes the community’s ability to engage in informal social control and prevent crime. However, research to date has yet to examine how women residents, who largely make up the population of residents who ‘remain behind,’ are affected by the incarceration of concentrated segments of male residents, who make up the majority of the prison population. Synthesizing prior research on coercive mobility, social capital, and the collateral consequences of incarceration, the present theoretical contribution incorporates effects to women’s forms of capital, including women’s social (i.e., resources inherent in neighboring relationships), physical (e.g., income), and human capital (e.g., education), as a mechanism to explain how concentrated incarceration contributes to deleterious consequences to informal social control. The author recommends that scholars examine the potentially gendered consequences of incarceration in future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Coercive mobility
• gender
• mass incarceration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although not explicitly described by coercive mobility scholars, physical capital is incorporated into the present work since it has been defined within the primary literature encompassing social capital (Coleman 1990).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaclyn M. Cwick

Jaclyn M. Cwick is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Grand Valley State University. She received her PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Missouri - St. Louis in 2016. Her interests include communities and crime, the consequences of mass incarceration, life-course criminology, and research methods. Cwick’s work has been published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency and Justice Quarterly.