The prison boom, local interpersonal violence, and domestic violence homicide

ABSTRACT

The US prison system has exploded since 1970, dramatically reshaping social, political, and economic life in rural communities. Since 2000, roughly one in five rural Americans resides in a prison town. The prison boom is the largest public works project perhaps since the New Deal. Despite a growing interest in prison building, there is a dearth of research examining prison impact – the economic, political, and social costs and benefits for communities that result from building a prison. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying the relationship between prison impact – measured as binary prison presence and cumulative prison count – on violent crime, specifically, intimate partner and domestic violence homicide (IPV/DV). We explore the theoretical foundations for this relationship, including the economic, geographic, and social effects of prisons and correction officers as a high-risk group for perpetrating IPV/DV. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find evidence of a negative association between prison impact and IPV/DV homicide, with an additional prison in the county corresponding with 0.04–0.12 fewer homicide events. While we are not advocating for prison building as a violence nor crime reduction strategy for communities, our findings complicate the policy consequences of the prison boom, especially in rural communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic violence
• homicide
• prison proliferation
• social determinants of health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2024.2365731

Notes

1. We focus specifically on prisons and exclude local/county jails and immigration detention facilities.

2. We differentiate between IPV (violence between current/former dating partners or spouses) and DV (between siblings, parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, or intimate partners.).

3. Facility address and latitude/longitude may not match where the facility’s mailing address is a post office box. In these cases, PPP researchers used Google Maps and ICPSR to confirm the county of the site’s physical location.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaitlyn M. Sims

Kaitlyn M. Sims is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She received her PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. Her work uses applied microeconomic techniques to study public policy questions related to domestic violence, the criminal-legal system, housing, and environmental health disparities.

Isabel Anadon

Isabel Anadón is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her work examines how changes and shifts in the legal system and changing definitions and norms of punishment, over time, impact the lives of those punished and the accompanying structural changes that accrue to their familial and social networks. Her current work documents and analyzes the systematic extension of immigration enforcement and control at the subnational level, across U.S. jurisdictions and states.

John Major Eason

John Major Eason is an Associate Professor in the Watson Family University Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute. He is author of “Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation.

Chloe Haimson

Chloe Haimson is the Director of Research of the Justice Policy Lab at the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Her research is at the intersection of prison reentry, punishment, race, and inequality. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022.