The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010

“To explain these preferences, punishment scholars point to the neoconservative politics of late modernity (Garland 2001b), a “new penology” to manage high-risk populations (Feeley and Simon 1992), public sentiment (Tonry 2004), the use of criminal justice and welfare institutions to tie postindustrial workers to preca…”

“Western and Pettit have shown that incarceration has become a routine life event for low-skilled black men—more common than serving in the military or earning a college degree (Pettit and Western 2004; Western 2006).”

“Moran’s I is the most commonly used statistic for detecting spatial clustering (Cliff and Ord 1973; Cressie 1993; Haining 1990), providing a summary global measure of whether the null hypothesis of spatial randomness can be rejected.”

“Although re-arrest rates have increased over time, the overall reconviction and reincarceration rates used for this study are much more stable (Langan and Levin 2002:11).4 For probationers and jail inmates, the corresponding three-year failure rate is 36 %.”

“Nevertheless, people convicted of felonies face more substantial and frequently permanent consequences (Ewald and Uggen 2012; Travis 2005; Uggen and Stewart 2015).”

“In 1960, the total U.S. incarceration rate hovered near 184 per 100,000 (Prison Policy Initiative, 2023), and more than 2.1 million people were estimated to have a felony conviction (Shannon et al., 2017, in supporting information tables).”

“It is estimated that over 70 million individuals in the United States have a criminal record on file with the FBI (Fields and Emshwiller 2014), and roughly 19 million are estimated to have a felony conviction (Shannon et al. 2017).”

“…men have been arrested by the age of 23 (Brame et al. 2014) and nearly one quarter of the Black population in the United States has a felony record (Shannon et al. 2017), understanding the subjective experiences of Black carceral citizens is imperative to fully understand racialized modernity in…”

“Shannon et al. (2017) estimate that 33 percent of adult Black men have felony convictions, compared with 13 percent of all adult men.”

“The focal independent variable is the Black percentage of a state ’ s felony record population, drawn from Shannon et al. (2017).”

“More than 1.2 million people were actively incarcerated in American jails and prisons as of 2021 (Carson, 2022); at least 7.3 million Americans have a history of incarceration and/or parole; and more than 19 million Americans carry a felony record (Shannon et al., 2017).”

“…and criminal justice responses: police surveillance, recorded criminal activities, and incarceration rates are highly concentrated in disadvantaged, predominantly Black neighborhoods (Friedson and Sharkey 2015; Meares and Fagan 2008; Tonry 1995; Sampson and Loeffler 2010; Shannon et al. 2017).”

“In the United States, approximately 8 percent of the adult population has a felony con- viction and 3 percent of adults have been imprisoned (Shannon et al. 2017).”

“Estimated state-level numbers of felons, overall and stratified by supervision status (where the supervised population includes those incarcerated, on parole or on probation), were obtained from Shannon et al. (2017).”

“Between the early 1960s and 2010, the number of adults in the United States with a criminal record is estimated to have more than quadrupled (Shannon et al. 2017).”

“Discriminatory hiring, health service, housing and social service practices as well as stigma related to justice involvement are routinely encountered following release, extending the potential health impact of incarceration long after release [2].”

“…(McCleary, 1978) for most people who are formerly incarcerated (FI) (Bahr et al., 2010; Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Cowie and Heathcott, 2003; Shannon et al., 2017), a small portion of this group, part of the growing System-Affected Academic (SAA) 1 movement (Tietjen, 2025) are able to…”

“…complicating this issue is that women who are socially disadvantaged, e.g., lower socioeconomic status, uninsured, racial/ethnic minorities, and/or unemployed, are disproportionately exposed to the CL system (Cowan, 2019; Rich et al., 2014; Shannon et al., 2017; Uggen et al., 2006; Western, 2006).”

“Even more – roughly 19 million – now have a felony criminal record (Shannon et al., 2017) and are subject to numerous policies and practices that shape the opportunities, resources, and activities available to them.”

“People with felony convictions account for 8% of all adults and 33% of the African American adult male population (Shannon et al., 2017).”

“Additionally, in the United States, another roughly 19 million people live with felony convictions (Shannon et al. 2017).”

“However, since 1 in 12 people in the United States, and one in three Black men, have a felony conviction (Shannon et al. 2017), this can be nearly impossible in practice.”

“Scholars estimate that at least nineteen million American adults have at least one felony conviction (Shannon et al., 2017).”

“A surprisingly large proportion of Americans, particularly men and racial minorities, have personal experience traveling through this system (Brame et al., 2012; Shannon et al., 2017).”

“Over 6 million Black men in the United States (U.S.) have been incarcerated at some point in their life [1] and often have worse mental health outcomes than Black men who have never been incarcerated [2].”

“The overall set of voting-eligible people with past felony convictions in New Jersey (not just those recently-reenfranchised) is substantially larger: we estimate around 400,000 based on materials from Shannon et al. (2017).”

“Black individuals are overrepresented in the share of the population with a felony conviction (Shannon et al., 2017), the most common prohibition resulting in denial during the background check process (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2023).”

“Data does suggest that 8% of US adults have been convicted of a felony (Shannon et al. 2017), representing the lower bounds of an estimate for the prevalence of firearm rights suspension.”

“Until 1950, when the US Supreme Court struck down of fi cial, race-based law school admissions criteria (in Sweatt v. Painter ), southern law schools formally excluded Black Americans and other racial minorities (Abel 1989).”

“Notably, the same study estimated that nearly one out of six Black men are currently in prison, on parole, or formerly incarcerated [2].”

“Importantly, as citizens most likely to have criminal justice system contact are statistically more likely to be Black or Latinx (Alexander, 2012; Shannon et al., 2017; Stewart & Uggen, 2020), such studies are informative, but speak only tangentially to the issue of felon-juror exclusion and the…”

“We strongly disagree with assertions that people with felony convictions should be barred from social work education—a prohibition that would affectmore than 19million individuals with such convictions (Shannon et al., 2017).”

“There have also been more ambitious estimates of a wider population of criminal justice involved people, namely, the number of ex-felons (Shannon et al., 2017; Uggen, Manza, & Thompson, 2006).”

“2These estimates are based on a combination of current work by Shannon et al. (2016) and our calculations of the fraction of felony sentences which are drug-related from the State Court Processing Statistics (United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs and Bureau of Justice Statistics 2014).”

“…procedures, including stricter identification requirements and earlier submission deadlines (AL S 301, 2019; AL H 538, 2021), while revisions to felony disenfranchisement rules expanded categories of disqualifying offenses in ways that disproportionately affected Black men (Shannon et al., 2017).”

“Mass incarceration was a dramatic social transformation that led to a historic rise in the prevalence of imprisonment, concentrated in impover-ished communities of color (Shannon et al. 2017; Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014).”

“Approximately 20 million Americans now have a felony criminal history, amounting to roughly 8% of the adult population and 1 in 3 African American adult males (Shannon et al., 2017).”

“A total of 25 hiring personnel from food and retail small businesses throughout the United States were interviewed in 2020 and 2021.”

“…Leasure and Kaminski 2021; Pager 2003; Pager et al. 2009; Uggen et al. 2014) together with massive disproportionalities in criminal records by race (Shannon et al. 2017), policies to reduce this difference, such as Ban-the-Box, have become part of a national conversation about how to make the…”

“A broader societal approach from multiple stakeholders must enter carceral spaces to assist the tens of millions of citizens (Shannon, Uggen, Schnittker, Thompson, Wakefield, and Massoglia, 2017) who have experienced the harm of incarceration and the burden of readjusting to life on the outside…”

“For instance, in Berghuis v. Smith (2010), the most recent FCS challenge heard by the US Supreme Court, Diapolis Smith appealed his conviction for second-degree murder by an all-White jury, arguing that African Americans comprised 7.8 percent of Kent County, MI, but only 6 percent of the jury pool.”

“…of individuals who are incapacitated in prison for a signi(cid:28)cant duration: 3% of all adults have been to prison, 8% have a felony conviction (Shannon et al. (2017)), and more than 77 million people in the US have criminal histories (Fields and Emshwiller (2014)), with about 40% of white and…”

“…Project, n.d., National Conference of State Legislatures, n.d.), as of 2010, 19 million people in the United States (U.S.) were living with a felony conviction (Shannon et al., 2017), and in 2023, approximately one million people were incarcerated in state prisons (Sawyer & Wagner, 2024).”

“But demographic reconstructions by independent scholars suggest that nearly twenty million American adults—overwhelmingly male—were felons or ex-felons in 2010 (Shannon et al. 2017).”

“As of 2019, 1 in 40 U.S. adults, or more than 6 million people, were under some form of correctional supervision in the United States, and 8 percent of all adults have a felony conviction (Minton, Beatty, and Zeng 2021; Shannon et al. 2017).”