No Room to Fall: Criminal Justice Contact and Neighborhood Disadvantage

Neighborhoods across the United States are shaped by the criminal justice system and socioeconomic inequality. This article examines whether multiple forms of criminal justice contact affect neighborhood attainment for a cohort of young adults coming of age in the era of mass incarceration. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, and census data, I analyze neighborhood conditions before and after contact with the criminal justice system. Conviction is a critical experience in the life course. Having a household member incarcerated is associated with moving to a worse neighborhood only for White young adults. I contextualize these findings in the literature on the cumulative disadvantages faced by the justice-involved population and the complexities of identifying causal effects for this population. For many, incarceration represents a late stage of criminal justice contact, at which point there is no room to fall. Disentangling the web of disadvantage that follows criminal justice contact is crucial as the effects of the era of mass incarceration continue to accumulate. Locational attainment contextualized within the life course must be central to understanding how the legal system creates and reproduces disadvantage.