The United States has had an issue with its incarceration rate for a long period of time. While the U.S. has made strides in the right direction with a decrease in crime rate and improvements to prosecution to criminal laws, the U.S. currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world and it’s not really that close (Gramlich, 2020). The U.S. leads all other major countries by a wide margin, the only countries you come within 200 are Thailand, Russia, and Cuba. Across the U.S. there are some states who are performing better or worse than the country average with their incarceration rates. Massachusetts is one of those states who is currently performing much better than other states in the country. So well actually that as of 2018 Massachusetts had an incarceration rate of 250 per one hundred thousand citizens. For this project Massachusetts county incarceration rates were evaluated since 1970.
The data used in these visualizations was gathered from the Vera Institute for Justice Dataset. This dataset contains prison and jail incarceration statistics for all races, and both genders at both state and county level from as early as 1970. The urban level of every county is also provided, ranging from rural to urban which was key to creating the custom highlighter.
The first visualizations created were two separate maps, one which showed the incarceration rate of county jails and the other showed incarceration rate county prisons, all statistics are given per one hundred thousand people. Massachusetts historically has had one of the lowest incarceration rates of any state in the United States, but comparing it to the rest of the world it is still much higher. The governor of Massachusetts has signed off on multiple bills in the past years that have aided in reducing the states incarceration rate. From reducing the number of mandatory minimum sentences, to changes to bail and giving inmates the opportunity to shorten their time by participating in re-entry programs. Massachusetts has taken the proper steps to reduce their incarceration rate (Lannan, 2019). When looking at the prisons incarceration rates map it can be seen that there is a wide variation across the counties. There are few counties with an incarceration rate less than 100, but Hampden County leads all other countries with a rate of 381.5. In the map of jail incarcerations the range is relatively the same, but this time there are higher rates in counties, with the highest being found in Franklin County at 524.
The next visualization created was an Area Chart which was intended to use both the data of incarceration in jails and prisons of each county since 1970 and show how they have changed over the years. Unfortunately, for Massachutess, the only data available for prison incarceration was from 2009 to 2016. Although the missing data for prisons makes it difficult to see how rates have changed fully, prisons rates are generally lower than jail so it can be assumed that the graph is not too far off from reality. Franklin County has the highest average for jail incarceration and the second highest for prison so that is it was evaluated over the given time period. Some points of interest on this area chart are the rapid increase in incarcerations that happened in the 80s and 90s. In the mid 70s Franklin County had an incarceration rate under 100 then it went up to 293 in 1988. Throughout the rest of the 80s into the 90s and into the early 2000s the incarceration rate continued to grow more where it peaked in 2006 at 655! In class a we have talked about incarceration rates and what caused them to increase during these specific decades. The increase in the 80s was caused not only by a rise in actual crime rates, but also more of a focus was brought to drug policies and arrest. The 90s was caused by the use of “enhanced sentencing” or other known as the three strikes rule. This could be explained as people who have committed crimes before were given a shorter leash on what they could get away with if a crime was committed a third time. A third offence, regardless of if it was a petty crime or not would lead to the perpetrator receiving a hefty punishment. Incarceration rates finally began to decrease in the late 2000s during the great recession, which is highlighted using a reference band on the Area Chart. The most recent data available shows that in 2018 the incarceration rate was 407, this is a substantial drop from its peak in 2006, but right on par with the rate 25 years earlier in 1993.
The last visualization created was an urbanicity highlighter which when paired with both maps is a useful tool to see if there is any correlation with the urbanization of a county and its incarceration rate. Massachusetts only has one urban county which is Suffolk, where the city of Boston is located. Although Boston has a population much larger than anywhere else in the state, its county is middle of the road for incarceration rate in both prisons and jails. Population density needs to be taken into account when looking at maps like this because rural Franklin County and small metro Hampden County having the highest prison and jail incarceration rates respectively means a lot more. There can be multiple factors which cause these areas to have higher rates, but what is obvious does not need to be said, change is needed in these areas.
Sources
Gramlich, J. (2020, May 30). U.S. incarceration rate is at its lowest in 20 years. Retrieved February 18, 2021, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/02/americas-incarceration-rate-is-at-a-two-decade-low/
Katie Lannan, K. L. (2019, April 25). Report: Mass. has the lowest incarceration rate in the country. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/25/vera-institute-massachusetts-prison-population