|
|
Information
Contact: Sarah Williams
Status: Complete
Publications: n/a
Associated Websites: n/a
Description
Over the last year SIDL has been working with Sudhir Venkatesh of the Sociology Department to understand the employment geography of formerly incarcerated people as they return home. Last summer the team worked together to survey roughly twenty recently released people to record their trajectory in the city as well as their activity every hour of the day - 30 days after their release. Each location and activity was mapped and coded.
Once mapped spatial analysis enabled a better understanding of the geographic relationship formerly incarcerated people have with their community/neighborhood. The research team decided to focus on the formerly incarcerated person’s relationship with work. Do the reentering people work in the neighborhood they return to? Do they find work in communities that have similar demographics to their own? Do they look for work in communities with similar characteristics as their own? How far away do formerly incarcerated people travel for work? Do these people perform illegal work, and if they do, is it close to home or far away?
Many results emerged from our work. A good example is this one: the majority of existing canonical research hypothesizes that illegal activity happens closer to the homes of those performing that activity. In contrast, our maps revealed that those engaged in illegal work, such as selling drugs, tend to navigate through more neighborhoods in the city and perform the activity farther from what they consider their home base. They are much more mobile than their counterparts who have legal jobs or no work at all, and leave their neighborhood more often. Our spatial analysis is surprising in that it establishes that illegal activity does not isolate formerly incarcerated people in their neighborhood, but rather, in some ways offers them the opportunity to leave. This relationship can be seen in the four images below. Each image represents reentering person and their spatial relationship to what they call work. It is clear that the formerly incarcerated person who describes their work as “illegal” traverse a much larger portion of the city.
Another preliminary finding of the spatial analysis is that it appears to be showing that formerly incarcerated people have strong ties between two or more neighborhoods. In other words the formerly incarcerated don’t just think of their neighborhood as where they live, but rather, as just one in a series that bonds them to several neighborhoods in the city.
The team is currently seeking funding to survey a larger group of reentering populations in order to illustrate the significance of the patterns discovered thus far.