Exploring the effects of incarceration on communities.

As the nation's incarceration rates reached their peak, researchers, scholars, and policy makers began to highlight several gaps in our understanding of and approach to studying incarceration. Emerging work considers that incarceration may have impacts reaching far beyond the prisoner, and that potential consequences extend throughout families and communities. This dissertation presents an exploratory research project of how prisoners' communities are affected by their incarceration, examining neighborhoods in New York City with high concentrations of imprisonment. The primary focus of the research was how community life is affected by incarceration on several different levels, and in relation to communities' abilities to generate social capital. The research was designed to explore how incarceration changes communities by eliciting residents' stories about what happened to family or to community after incarceration of community members. These stories were analyzed to identify causal processes by which incarceration may become a part of community life and affect community social capital. The research found that family connections to prisoners require a tremendous amount of energy and resources that take away from their ability to generate social capital within the family. At the same time, high incarceration neighborhoods have limited social capital, as well as higher concentrations of families that are connected to prisoners. Community defined problems center around issues such as sanitation, schooling, jobs, and providing activities for young people. The findings suggest that concentrations of families who are connected to prisoners jeopardizes their ability to be connected to their neighborhoods, which in turn limits the generation of social capital in high incarceration neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]