Biography

Texas A&M University College Station - Sociology

Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison
John
Eason
Madison, Wisconsin Area
My research interests link context, punishment, and spatial inequality to community processes. My program of research challenges existing and develops new theoretical and conceptual models of context, punishment, and rural/urban processes in several ways. First, by tracing the emergence of the rural ghetto I establish a new conceptual model of rural neighborhoods. Next, I show the function of the ghetto in rural communities establishing a model of how concentrated disadvantage functions across rural and urban space. This model also reframes theories for understanding racial formation, system of punishment, and community processes by rethinking traditional neighborhood theory like ghettos outside the urban context.

These research interests take shape across several core projects. My book entitled Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation centers on how rural community context affects prison placement and how prison placement in turn impacts rural communities. I am also exploring theories established in the book with several co-authors through others projects using novel data. First, the Prison Proliferation Project will advance discourse on the consequences and causes of the prison boom. Second, the Project on Arkansas Prisoner Reentry and Health will explore how the rural context both shapes and is shaped by prisoner reentry, access to health care, and incidence of HIV/AIDS. Third, I am also investigating the role of rural communities in the great crime drop by looking at murder rates across the rural-urban continuum from 1975-2005.