Researchers treat incarceration as a disease epidemic, discover small changes help

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-06/vt-rti062414.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 25-Jun-2014
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Contact: Tiffany Trent
ttrent@vt.edu
540-231-6822
Virginia Tech
Researchers treat incarceration as a disease epidemic, discover small changes help

Virginia Bioinformatics Institute researchers apply infection-modeling to incarceration

The incarceration rate has nearly quadrupled since the U.S. declared a war on drugs, researchers say. Along with that, racial disparities abound. Incarceration rates for black Americans are more than six times higher than those for white Americans, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

To explain these growing racial disparities, researchers at Virginia Tech are using the same modeling techniques used for infectious disease outbreaks to take on the mass incarceration problem.

By treating incarceration as an infectious disease, the scientists demonstrated that small but significant differences in prison sentences can lead to large differences in incarceration rates. The research was published in June in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Incarceration can be "transmitted" to others, the researchers say. For instance, incarceration can increase family members' emotional and economic stress or expose family and friends to a network of criminals, and these factors can lead to criminal activity.

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Harsher sentencing may actually result in higher levels of criminality.

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