Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse — Coercive Mobility

Crisis in Perception · Sep 5, 2026 · 40m

What happens when imprisonment becomes concentrated so heavily in particular neighborhoods that incarceration itself becomes part of the environment those communities must continually adapt to?

Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.

Using Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse by Todd R. Clear as our lens, this investigation examines the community-level consequences of mass incarceration and the system Clear calls “coercive mobility.”

Clear argues that incarceration in the United States became…