Once a booming center of iron and steel production, the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania has tried to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, and has struggled to keep from falling into municipal bankruptcy in the face of de-industrialization. With its brick downtown buildings set against the long, low ridges of the Pocono Mountains, Scranton—“the Electric City”—is the main population center of Lackawanna County, a former coal county, and sits in the northeastern corner of the state. Like most other small, blue-collar cities in the Rust Belt, Scranton has experienced continued economic ups and downs—and skyrocketing incarceration rates.



In fact, Lackawanna County has one of the highest jail incarceration rates in Pennsylvania, higher than any county in the state besides Philadelphia, and higher than any county in New York, New Jersey, or anywhere in New England. In 1970, the rate of people locked up in the Lackawanna County jail was 46 for every 100,000 residents aged 15 to 64—slightly less than half the rate for the state of Pennsylvania as a whole. (All incarceration rates are presented per 100,000 residents aged 15 to 64.) In 2014, the rate of people locked up in the Lackawanna County jail was roughly 698 for every 100,000 residents, more than twice the national rate. If we include people who were sent to state prison from the county in these numbers, the combined jail and prison incarceration rate for Lackawanna County was 1,531 people per 100,000 residents in 2014. By way of comparison, the combined jail and prison incarceration for New York City—the largest city of the most incarcerated country on the planet—was 608 per 100,000 in 2014.