In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Louisiana Gulf Coast, effectively damaging a vast majority of the housing stock in the New Orleans metropolitan area. Because many of the neighborhoods where ex-prisoners normally reside are now uninhabitable, it is unclear where newly released prisoners from Louisiana correctional facilities now reside. It also remains unclear whether this likely geographic displacement of returning prisoners because of Hurricane Katrina will have any adverse, or even beneficial, effects on returning prisoners. For instance, one hypothesis would be that hurricane-related destruction has produced barriers for prisoners to reunite with their families and social support networks, thus making recidivism more likely. On the other hand, if prisoners are blocked from reuniting with their criminal peers, then their chances of desisting from crime may be more likely.
Through the use of a natural experiment, this study seeks to establish whether the dispersal of ex-prisoners away from their former neighborhoods will lead to lower levels of recidivism. The first part of this study describes the geographic pattern of prisoner reentry in Louisiana before and after Hurricane Katrina by mapping the addresses upon prison admission and release for two separate cohorts of returning prisoners, one released prior to Hurricane Katrina and the second released afterwards. A key objective of the first part of the study is to describe the types of neighborhoods, in terms of poverty and other measures of disadvantage, where ex-prisoners reside upon release in order to determine if there are any differences in the typical residential environment across the two cohorts. For the second part of the study, I estimate the causal effect of hurricane-induced geographic displacement on the likelihood of recidivism for ex-prisoners by comparing the recidivism outcomes for the two cohorts of ex-prisoners.
