Research on incarceration has focused on prisons, but jail detention is far more common than imprisonment. Jails are local institutions that detain people before trial or incarcerate them for short sentences for low-level offenses. Research from the 1970s and 1980s viewed jails as “managing the rabble,” a small and deeply disadvantaged segment of urban populations that struggled with problems of addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. The 1990s and 2000s marked a period of mass criminalization in which new styles of policing and court processing produced large numbers of criminal cases for minor crimes, concentrated in low-income communities of color. In a period of widespread criminal justice contact for minor offenses, how common is jail incarceration for minority men, particularly in poor neighborhoods? We estimate cumulative risks of jail incarceration with an administrative data file that records all jail admissions and discharges in New York City from 2008 to 2017. Although New York has a low jail incarceration rate, we find that 26.8% of Black men and 16.2% of Latino men, in contrast to only 3% of White men, in New York have been jailed by age 38 y. We also find evidence of high rates of repeated incarceration among Black men and high incarceration risks in high-poverty neighborhoods. Despite the jail’s great reach in New York, we also find that the incarcerated population declined in the study period, producing a large reduction in the prevalence of jail incarceration for Black and Latino men.

关于监禁的研究主要集中在监狱，但监狱拘留比监禁更常见。监狱是地方机构，可以在审判前拘留人们，或因低级犯罪而对他们进行短期监禁。1970 年代和 1980 年代的研究将监狱视为“管理暴民”，这是一小部分处于严重不利地位的城市人口，他们与毒瘾、精神疾病和无家可归问题作斗争。1990 年代和 2000 年代标志着大规模刑事定罪的时期，新的警务和法庭处理方式催生了大量针对轻微犯罪的刑事案件，集中在低收入的有色人种社区。在对轻罪进行广泛刑事司法联系的时期，少数族裔男子入狱是多么普遍，特别是在贫困地区？我们使用记录了 2008 年至 2017 年纽约市所有入狱和出狱的行政数据文件来估计监狱监禁的累积风险。尽管纽约的监狱入狱率较低，但我们发现 26.8% 的黑人和 16.2% 的相比之下，纽约的拉丁裔男性只有 3% 的白人男性在 38 岁时被判入狱。我们还发现了黑人男性重复监禁率高和高贫困社区被监禁风险高的证据。尽管监狱在纽约的影响力很大，但我们还发现，在研究期间被监禁的人口有所减少，从而大大减少了黑人和拉丁裔男性的监狱监禁率。