Prison
population rate,
United States
748
per 100,000
120
per 100,000
Prison
population
rate, China
32
per 100,000
Prison
population
rate, India
High imprisonment rates localized
Cynicism, hopelessness common in ‘incarceration hot spots’
By Bruce Bower
Crime rates have dropped in the United
States over the past 15 years, yet prison
populations have soared. The U. S. incarceration rate now exceeds that of other
industrialized nations by five times or
more, with almost 2. 3 million people
behind bars and another 5 million on
parole or probation.
A major reason for this apparent
paradox has gone largely ignored, says
Harvard University sociologist Robert Sampson. Certain
disadvantaged sections of
cities have acted as incarceration hot spots in the midst of
a general downturn in crime,
he reported August 16.
Ballooning incarceration
rates in these poor, predominantly black neighborhoods,
especially among young men,
create a sense of collective cynicism and
fatalism that fuels further misconduct
and imprisonment, Sampson said. He
and graduate student Charles Loeffler of
Harvard describe their findings, based
on surveys and crime-data analyses of
Chicago neighborhoods, in the summer
Daedalus alongside essays inspired by an
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
task force on mass incarceration.
“Mass incarceration in the United
States has a deep local concentration in
relatively few disadvantaged communities,” Sampson asserted.
There’s an upside to this bleak situation, commented Harvard sociologist
Bruce Western. Cash-strapped states
are now willing to explore innovative,
scientifically tested methods to reduce
repeat offending. One such approach in
Hawaii targeted men on probation considered likely to commit new offenses.
Frequent, random drug tests backed up
by swift, short jail stays for infractions
substantially deterred these men from
using drugs and committing new crimes.
Programs like this cost about $3,000
annually per person, compared with an
average of $30,000 to imprison one per-
son for a year, Western said.
Chicago crime data for 1990 to 1995
show that a large majority of prison and
jail populations came from two poor,
black sections of the city, Sampson and
Loeffler found. During that time, crime
and violence declined overall in Chicago
while incarceration rates
rose in those two areas.
Following the city’s crime
reductions, Chicago officials
closed public housing units
in the two high-crime, high-
incarceration areas because
they were considered breed-
ing grounds for drug dealing
and violence.
But between 2000 and
2005, the geographic location of each
incarceration hot spot in Chicago shifted
slightly to the southwest as former public
housing residents moved. Incarceration
rates in the two new hot spots remained
about the same as they had been in the old
ones a decade earlier, Sampson said.
Interviews of almost 8,000 Chicago
residents between 1995 and 2002 identified intense cynicism about the legal
system and hopelessness about future
prospects among hot spot residents.
Teenagers and children expressed some
of the grimmest attitudes. “Many kids
said they didn’t expect to live past age 25
or to avoid ending up in prison,” Sampson
said. Researchers need to focus on
how the concentration of incarceration within certain poor neighborhoods
undermines the quality of life for everyone living there, he added.
Not all poor neighborhoods become
incarceration hot spots, Sampson
emphasized.
“Many kids
said they
didn’t expect
to live past
age 25 or
to avoid ...
prison.”
roBert SAmpSon
retiring at 62 boosts well-being
People who retire at or near age
62 receive a surprising benefit—a
greater relative increase in physical
and emotional well-being than those
who retire earlier or later, Esteban
Calvo of Boston College reported
August 15. Age 62 is when U.S.
citizens become eligible to receive
partial Social Security benefits. Retir-
ing at culturally and institutionally
expected ages yields large dividends
in well-being, Calvo suggested. He
and his colleagues analyzed data
from a national sample of 5,395
people tracked from their 50s into
their late 60s. A majority retired
during a window around age 62.
Members of that group reported
substantial improvements in how
they felt physically and emotionally
after retiring. These signs of general
well-being took a progressive turn for
the worse in participants who retired
at increasingly earlier or later ages.
— Bruce Bower
Depressed teens not shunned
Depressed teens skirt the social
margins of high school mainly
because they choose to make
friends with peers who have compa-
rably bleak moods, according to a
study presented August 15 by David
Schaefer of Arizona State University
in Tempe. Social withdrawal and
avoidance of others by depressed
teens prompt their selectivity in
choosing friends, he said. Schaefer
and colleague Olga Kornienko ana-
lyzed previously gathered data on
3,702 teens at 16 public and private
schools to assess the likelihood of
friendships between individuals with
roughly equal mood levels, as deter-
mined from interviews of teens, par-
ents and teachers. — Bruce Bower
www.sciencenews.org
September 11, 2010 | science news | 9
