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Title: Education and Poverty As Factors in White and Black Rural and Urban Prison Admission Rates
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: The rise in White imprisonment in rural areas has gone almost completely unnoticed and undiscussed until very recently. Using data newly analyzed from the National Corrections Reporting Program restricted files for 2000-2013, this report documents the higher rates of prison admissions for Whites in rural areas and shows that these higher rates are tied to the higher rates of White poverty and lower White educational levels in rural areas. Further, places with less educated White people showed more growth in White imprisonment. Poverty and education explain the urban-rural difference in a statistical sense, but this does not mean that there is no rural-urban difference. Rather, the analysis points to the high concentration of White disadvantage in rural areas and smaller cities. The Black patterns are different: although rates of poverty and high school dropouts are higher in rural areas for Blacks, the correlations are weaker than for Whites and rural areas have lower Black imprisonment rates both before and after controls for education and poverty. Looking at changes in imprisonment rates between 2000-6 and 2007-11, both Black and White imprisonment rose in areas with higher high school dropout rates and lower Black percentages, but the effects of poverty and college graduation rates and percent Hispanic varied by race in multivariate models. Overall, the findings point to the importance both of disaggregating Black and White imprisonment rates and of recognizing that overall national trends obscure marked differences in the trends between places. They also point to concentrated White disadvantage in White rural areas as linked to rising White imprisonment rates. Further research is necessary to understand these trends.
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Authors: Oliver, Pamela
Publisher: University of Wisconsin- Madison
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Crime and Deviance, Education, Race and Ethnicity
Countries: United States