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Policing and punishment are unevenly distributed across geographic space. Research analyzing place-based variation in the criminal legal system is increasing, asking how community conditions contribute to variation in criminal justice outcomes and how multiple criminal justice exposures (e.g., policing and punishment) vary together in places. In this article, we identify spatial-contextual analyses of the criminal legal system and summarize their contributions by organizing them by their three major approaches: those emphasizing crime, urban ecology, or social control. We describe challenges the subfield faces, including an overemphasis on large cities and an overcommitment to analyzing criminal justice institutions like police or prisons discretely, when they are often experienced cumulatively and simultaneously. We call for research that transcends received institutional divisions, generates recommendations for stakeholders at multiple scales, makes greater use of formal spatial modeling, and analyzes places across the urban-rural continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The racially disparate impacts of the carceral state are well studied, but most of the research has focused on large cities. Are suburban and urban policing similar? One trend suggests suburban policing might be in flux: U.S. suburbs underwent a dramatic demographic shift between 1990 and 2014. Their White populations declined sharply and their poor, non-White, and foreign-born populations all grew. During the same time, broken windows policing, with its aggressive enforcement of low-level quality-of-life crimes, gained popularity. Are suburban police departments adopting broken windows strategies or making racially disproportionate arrests in response to recent racial and economic changes? I use panel data (N = 1,038 suburbs and 50 cities, with eight observations 1990 to 2014) in fixed effects regression models to address these questions. Data are compiled from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program and the Census. Descriptive statistics show that while quality-of-life arrests are down overall, the White–Black disparity in suburban arrests remains extreme, especially in mostly White suburbs. Multivariate models indicate that increases in poor people in a suburb are associated with increases in quality-of-life arrests, while more Hispanic people are associated with fewer arrests. Results suggest that urban and suburban policing dynamics are quite different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States witnessed a dramatic expansion of the penal state from the 1970s to the Great Recession of 2008. One key puzzle is why penal state growth continued unabated long after crime levels peaked in the early 1990s. We focus on local policing and consider the relationship between growing city-level law enforcement expenditures and two shifts: first, the move toward an economy increasingly organized around residential real estate; and second, city-level welfare retrenchment. We argue that increasing economic reliance on housing price appreciation during the late 1990s and the 2000s heightened demand for expanded law enforcement even as actual risks of crime victimization fell. At the same time, cities increasingly addressed social problems through criminal justice--rather than social service--capacities. We assess these arguments using a dataset of 171 cities' police expenditures between 1992 and 2010. Results of a dynamic panel model indicate that places with more pronounced reliance on housing price growth and mortgage investment exhibited correspondingly greater growth of local law enforcement, as did places with decreased social service spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]