About

John M. Eason is a renegade scholar, teacher, mentor, and recovering community/political organizer with experience working across neighborhoods on the Southside of Chicago and serving as Director of Field Operations for then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. He currently holds the position of Watson Family University Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Additionally, he is a Senior Research Fellow in the Justice Policy Center and the Office of Race and Equity Research at the Urban Institute, where he leads the project on Reducing Prisons in Rural Communities of Color. Eason is also the Founder and Director of the emerging Justice Policy Lab at Brown University, which provides research opportunities and mentoring to junior scholars. His research employs mixed-methods to create theoretically informed, empirically driven, and policy-relevant work that informs understanding of place, health, race, punishment, and rural/urban processes. He is the author of "Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation," published by the University of Chicago Press. His work on COVID in confined spaces and prison proliferation is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Demography
• Environmental health
• Nursing
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Gerontology
• Social psychology
• Geography
• Psychiatry
• Virology

Selected publications

• Advancing Ethnography and Mechanisms of Misinheritance During the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

  American Journal of Sociology · 2025-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Are Schools Stricter at the Border? Investigating the Relationships Between School Strictness, Juvenile Justice, and the Border

  2025-04-24

  book-chapter

  Immigration disparities are associated with strict school climates and juvenile justice. Place also matters concerning school strictness and disproportionate minority contact for minority youth. What remains unknown is the relationship between school strictness, immigration, and punishment along the Texas-Mexico border. Drawing from the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), we address two questions regarding the relationship between school strictness and juvenile justice referrals in border and non-border schools. First, do the relationships between school strictness and juvenile referrals differ between border and non-border schools? Second, does school strictness moderate the children of immigrants’ juvenile justice referrals at border and non-border schools? Findings indicate border and non-border distinctions regarding both strict and lenient school disciplinary practices and the relationships with juvenile justice referrals. This study contributes to juvenile justice research by investigating potential links between school strictness, immigration, juvenile justice referrals, and place.

  PublisherDOI

• Cervical Cancer and a History of Incarceration: Examining a Social Determinant of Health

  Journal of Correctional Health Care · 2024-03-04 · 1 citations

  article

  Females who are incarcerated are disproportionately burdened by cancer, particularly cervical cancer. We measured the odds of cervical cancer compared with nonscreenable cancers for females who were incarcerated before diagnosis. By comparing a cancer for which screening and vaccination are available with cancers for which neither are available, we aimed to assess the relationship of incarceration with diseases for which preventive care mitigates risk. We created a novel data set combining cancer data from a large cancer center with incarceration data from the state department of corrections. We then estimated the odds of cervical cancer relative to nonscreenable cancers for those with and without a history of incarceration. Females with a history of incarceration had greater odds of being diagnosed with cervical cancer compared with nonscreenable cancers (odds ratio = 7.04; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.4-11.0) relative to those who had not been incarcerated. Adjusting for race and age, the odds of cervical cancer remained significantly greater for those with a history of incarceration (adjusted odds ratio = 3.86; 95% CI: 2.3-6.3). Our findings support the need for expanded cervical cancer screening and vaccination opportunities for incarcerated females and increased access to preventive health care after release.

  PublisherDOI

• Crime, Violence, and Criminal Justice in Rural America: Toward a Rural Neighborhood Effect

  Annual Review of Criminology · 2024-09-26 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We review the current scholarship on rural policing, punishment, crime, and reentry. We shift the focus from the “square of crime” to an expansive understanding of crime and punishment in rural communities that uses neighborhood effects to study inequality across places. A central focus of the article is an investigation of the prison boom or the tripling of prison facilities in the United States. Ultimately, the prison boom is largely a rural phenomenon. As such, we examine how prison building is a product of carceral capacity tied to rurality and race. By focusing on the neighborhood effect, we can theorize what contributes to, and mitigates, crime and punishment across rural communities. In building toward a theory of a rural neighborhood effect, we investigate context through understanding the role of spatial and racial stratification in shaping inequality across rural places.

  PublisherDOI

• Policing, Punishment, and Place: Spatial-Contextual Analyses of the Criminal Legal System

  CrimRxiv · 2024-07-12

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Policing and punishment are unevenly distributed across geographic space. Research analyzing place-based variation in the criminal legal system is increasing, asking how community conditions contribute to variation in criminal justice outcomes and how multiple criminal justice exposures (e.g., policing and punishment) vary together in places. In this article, we identify spatial-contextual analyses of the criminal legal system and summarize their contributions by organizing them by their three major approaches: those emphasizing crime, urban ecology, or social control. We describe challenges the subfield faces, including an overemphasis on large cities and an overcommitment to analyzing criminal justice institutions like police or prisons discretely, when they are often experienced cumulatively and simultaneously. We call for research that transcends received institutional divisions, generates recommendations for stakeholders at multiple scales, makes greater use of formal spatial modeling, and analyzes places across the urban-rural continuum.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing the Impact of Cannabis Decriminalization on Racial Disparities in Chicago’s Cannabis Possession Arrests

  Sociology of Race and Ethnicity · 2024-02-22 · 1 citations

  article

  Black and Hispanic neighborhoods have suffered the most severe consequences of the “war on drugs.” As the war on drugs waned, cannabis legalization/decriminalization efforts increased across America. A prime example of decriminalization occurred in August of 2012 as the City of Chicago introduced a new law providing officers with option to ticket, rather than arrest, individuals caught in possession of 15 grams of cannabis or less. As cannabis policy continues evolving, it remains to be seen whether or not the trend toward decriminalization will produce equitable changes in drug arrest outcomes across racial/ethnic groups. We employ data tracking cannabis arrests over time by neighborhood to assess the impact of cannabis decriminalization in Chicago and estimate racial disparities in the likelihood of arrest (v. ticket) using two sets of models: within-neighborhood models and hierarchical logistic regressions with random effects. We find that Blacks and non-White Hispanics are more likely to be arrested than ticketed for minor cannabis possession in Chicago following the introduction of the Alternative Cannabis Enforcement (ACE) program, regardless of the neighborhood where the arrest took place. In addition, Black neighborhoods did not experience the same reduction in arrests after the law changed in comparison with racially mixed, White, or predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods. Our findings draw attention to the differential deployment of discretionary policing strategies across neighborhoods of different racial/ethnic composition. Although Chicago’s ACE program has lowered the overall rate of cannabis arrests, major racial/ethnic disparities in those arrests remain and become exacerbated when examining macro neighborhood-level trends.

  PublisherDOI

• Punishment is purple: The political economy of prison building

  Punishment & Society · 2024-01-02 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The United States is unique among rich countries in the world in its level of contemporary mass incarceration, a massive social change that has reshaped the nature of inequality and social mobility. We have more than tripled the number of prison facilities since 1970. Despite employing nearly 450,000 corrections officers, occupying a land mass of roughly 600 square miles, and costing conservatively $30 billion to build, this massive public works project has transformed the American countryside virtually unnoticed, with nearly 70% of U.S. facilities being built in rural communities. We suggest that mass incarceration—more than 2 million locked up annually—was not possible without the transformation of the American countryside through the prison boom—the increase from roughly 500 to nearly 1700 carceral facilities. There is a longstanding belief that the rural town leaders and politicians responsible for the prison boom are almost exclusively white, male, Republicans. We explore the political, social, and economic influences of prison building across states, regions, and cities/towns. Using multilevel modeling, we find that racial and economic disadvantage predicts prison building in towns, and party affiliation of state legislatures predicts prison building across different periods of the prison boom. While others find a link between Republican Party strength in state legislatures and mass incarceration, our findings suggest that prison building, like other types of punishment, results from bipartisan political support for the state's ability to punish. We conclude by advancing an expanded theoretical approach to the prison boom.

  PublisherDOI

• Are Schools Stricter at the Border? Investigating the Relationships Between School Strictness, Juvenile Justice, and the Border

  Journal of School Violence · 2024-02-18 · 1 citations

  article

  Immigration disparities are associated with strict school climates and juvenile justice. Place also matters concerning school strictness and disproportionate minority contact for minority youth. What remains unknown is the relationship between school strictness, immigration, and punishment along the Texas-Mexico border. Drawing from the Texas Education Agency's (TEA) Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), we address two questions regarding the relationship between school strictness and juvenile justice referrals in border and non-border schools. First, do the relationships between school strictness and juvenile referrals differ between border and non-border schools? Second, does school strictness moderate the children of immigrants' juvenile justice referrals at border and non-border schools? Findings indicate border and non-border distinctions regarding both strict and lenient school disciplinary practices and the relationships with juvenile justice referrals. This study contributes to juvenile justice research by investigating potential links between school strictness, immigration, juvenile justice referrals, and place.

  PublisherDOI

• The prison boom, local interpersonal violence, and domestic violence homicide

  Journal of Crime and Justice · 2024-06-16

  article

  The US prison system has exploded since 1970, dramatically reshaping social, political, and economic life in rural communities. Since 2000, roughly one in five rural Americans resides in a prison town. The prison boom is the largest public works project perhaps since the New Deal. Despite a growing interest in prison building, there is a dearth of research examining prison impact – the economic, political, and social costs and benefits for communities that result from building a prison. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying the relationship between prison impact – measured as binary prison presence and cumulative prison count – on violent crime, specifically, intimate partner and domestic violence homicide (IPV/DV). We explore the theoretical foundations for this relationship, including the economic, geographic, and social effects of prisons and correction officers as a high-risk group for perpetrating IPV/DV. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find evidence of a negative association between prison impact and IPV/DV homicide, with an additional prison in the county corresponding with 0.04–0.12 fewer homicide events. While we are not advocating for prison building as a violence nor crime reduction strategy for communities, our findings complicate the policy consequences of the prison boom, especially in rural communities.

  PublisherDOI

• The Prison Bust: Declining carceral capacity in an era of mass incarceration

  Punishment & Society · 2023-11-20 · 10 citations

  article

  While there is a growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of the US prison boom—the tripling of prison facilities between 1970 and 2000—much less is known about current patterns of prison closures. We use novel data capturing the universe of prison closures (N = 188) from 2000 to 2022 to identify and characterize what we term “the prison bust”—the period since 2000 when prison closures began to climb and eventually eclipse new prison building. We show that the prison bust is, in part, a consequence of development-oriented prison-building policies that aggressively used prisons to stimulate struggling local economies. The bust is primarily concentrated in the counties that pursued prison building most aggressively, reflecting a highly cyclical and reactionary pattern of prison placement and closure. We also show that, relative to counties with at least one prison but no closures, closures are concentrated in metro counties with stronger local economies and multiple prisons. Overall, we highlight the prison bust as an important new era in the history of US punishment and provide a new dataset for investigating its causes and consequences. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Chloe Haimson

  Providence College

  13 shared

• Miner P. Marchbanks

  11 shared

• Melissa C. Skala

  Morgridge Institute for Research

  11 shared

• Noelle K. LoConte

  University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center

  11 shared

• Kay S. Varela

  Arizona State University

  10 shared

• Jamilia J. Blake

  Texas A&M University

  9 shared

• Danielle Wallace

  9 shared

• Amy K. Taylor

  University of Nottingham

  9 shared

Labs

• Research Policy LabsPI

Awards & honors

• William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and La…