Released Prisoners Struggle to Establish Neighborhood Connections

Race is an enormous factor in imprisonment. While black people make up just 12 percent of the U.S. adult population, there are more black people in U.S. prisons than white people, and the rate of imprisonment for blacks is five times that of whites. Hispanics are 16 percent of the adult population, yet account for 23 percent of inmates. These racial disparities persist, and are likely reinforced, even when they leave prison.

That’s according to a new study published in the Journal of Urban Affairs by Jessica Simes, a sociologist at Boston University. The study used unique and detailed data from the Boston Reentry Study, which tracked 122 men and women released from state prisons in Massachusetts in 2013 and relocated to Boston. The study collected addresses for these individuals as well as details on their neighborhood conditions, family and support structures, specific type of housing, moves, and more. Simes matched this information to degrees of neighborhood disadvantage using census tract data of incidence of such things as child poverty, unemployment, public-assistance income, and female-headed households (female-headed households are more than twice as likely to be poor as all U.S. households).