Ángel is a PhD candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley who conducts research at the intersection of (sub)urban sociology, race and inequality, policing, incarceration, and housing. Their dissertation investigates a contemporary and understudied driver of segregation in the metropolitan United States: prison proliferation. His previous research on racial and renter threat in California suburbs received the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and was recently published in Social Problems. Ángel’s work has received generous support from the National Science Foundation, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society, and the Russell Sage Foundation. They received a Master of City Planning from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and BAs in sociology and economics from the University of Southern California.
My dissertation, “Suburban Dreams Deferred: Prison Proliferation in the Post-Civil Rights U.S.,” describes a contemporary and understudied driver of racial residential segregation in the metropolitan United States: prison proliferation. The enormous and globally unparalleled rise in U.S. incarceration beginning in the mid-1970s is well documented. Part of what made this possible was the construction of hundreds of new prisons. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. reached the peak of the prison construction boom when a new prison opened every 15 days. While many prisons were built in rural areas, I examine what happens as communities developed and suburbanized around prisons. Today, the majority of the over 1,600 state and federal adult U.S. prisons are located within metropolitan areas, including over 500 facilities in suburban areas. Drawing on nearly fifty years of survey and administrative data, I ask, across three papers: to what extent did the U.S. prison boom deepen racial and economic segregation in cities and suburbs?
While literature on the persistence of segregation in the “post-civil rights” period focuses less on state actors, my first paper documents the relationship between prison proliferation and segregation at the neighborhood and place-level. I find that suburbs with prisons have higher levels of racial segregation than those without, and this relationship holds even when excluding incarcerated people from segregation estimates and controlling for structural factors related to segregation. I point to scholarship on how neighborhood frames contribute to place-level stratification and how institutions help to create and inculcate racial-spatial boundaries to help explain these findings. To examine the extent to which prisons serve as segregating forces in suburbs, I leverage the generalized synthetic control method in the second paper. This design allows for variation in “treatment time” (e.g., when a prison opened) and uses data from pretreatment periods as benchmarks to weigh “control units” (e.g., those places that never received a prison) to make the best possible predictions for treated counterfactuals. I find that while cities and suburbs where prisons would be built already had higher levels of racial segregation well before prison construction, prisons built in the 1980s and 1990s further deepened racial segregation. In the final paper, I plan to flip the independent and dependent variables to investigate the determinants of prison siting.
Ultimately, my dissertation offers three major contributions for research on the carceral state, sub/urban development, and residential segregation. First, prisons are state projects that racially and economically differentiate metropolitan space. Because prisons were built disproportionately in economically disinvested places without other industrial bases, they likely play an outsized role in their development. Second, prisons are place-based institutions like schools or public housing developments that influence the shared social meanings attached to certain neighborhoods and places that work to perpetuate residential segregation. Finally, I argue that prison proliferation, a racial project that expanded the state’s carceral capacity, can also be understood as an overlooked redirection of the state’s late twentieth century segregating efforts outside of housing policy.