Uploaded November 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment
Dr Jessica T Simes (Boston University, Sociology)
About the seminar
Punishing Places applies a unique spatial analysis to mass incarceration in the United States. It demonstrates that our highest imprisonment rates are now in small cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Simes argues that mass incarceration should be conceptualized as one of the legacies of U.S. racial residential segregation, but that a focus on large cities has diverted vital scholarly and policy attention away from communities affected most by mass incarceration today. This book presents novel measures for estimating the community-level effects of incarceration using spatial, quantitative, and qualitative methods. This analysis has broad and urgent implications for policy reforms aimed at ameliorating the community effects of mass incarceration and promoting alternatives to the carceral system.
View Jessica T Simes book on the University of Califronia Press Website: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520380332/punishing-places
Crime, Justice and Society Seminar Series
The Crime, Justice and Society seminars are co-hosted by the Criminal Law and Criminology subject areas of Edinburgh Law School and are open to all. We particularly welcome students from our LLM and MSc programmes to join us.
The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment
Dr Jessica T Simes (Boston University, Sociology)
About the seminar
Punishing Places applies a unique spatial analysis to mass incarceration in the United States. It demonstrates that our highest imprisonment rates are now in small cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Simes argues that mass incarceration should be conceptualized as one of the legacies of U.S. racial residential segregation, but that a focus on large cities has diverted vital scholarly and policy attention away from communities affected most by mass incarceration today. This book presents novel measures for estimating the community-level effects of incarceration using spatial, quantitative, and qualitative methods. This analysis has broad and urgent implications for policy reforms aimed at ameliorating the community effects of mass incarceration and promoting alternatives to the carceral system.
View Jessica T Simes book on the University of Califronia Press Website: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520380332/punishing-places
Crime, Justice and Society Seminar Series
The Crime, Justice and Society seminars are co-hosted by the Criminal Law and Criminology subject areas of Edinburgh Law School and are open to all. We particularly welcome students from our LLM and MSc programmes to join us.
