Jail incarceration across the U.S.: The role of the local state and place-based punishment vulnerability

Abstract

Social scientists have highlighted jail incarceration as an important social problem in the United States. However, few national-level generalizable studies have investigated how the characteristics of communities and their local governments influence jail incarceration, despite jails being an intrinsically community-level institution largely run by county governments. In this paper, we ask how place-based community characteristics, particularly county government characteristics, are associated with jail incarceration. To answer this question, we draw primarily from two literatures, place-based punishment vulnerability and research on the local state, to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing local jail incarceration. We utilize a unique data set that includes primary data collected from county governments across the nation. We examine the extent to which socioeconomic, sociodemographic, and county government characteristics are associated with jail incarceration rates using multivariate regression analysis with state-fixed effects for 1400 counties. We find that elevated jail incarceration rates are found in high-poverty, evangelical counties of mid-level economic health with county governments that have introduced service cuts and have local leaders that engage in carceral entrepreneurship. These findings have important implications for the study of jails across the United States.