North Nashville neighborhood (ZIP code 37208) has the highest incarceration rate in the entire country.

by Rod Williams - The highest incarceration rate is not a zip code in Chicago or New Orleans or Los

Angeles, but Nashville Tennessee. If one out of seven are incarcerated, think about the rate at which people in that age group are actually committing crime. Not everyone who is a criminal gets caught- probably only a minority of those committing crime are ever caught and not all of those who are caught are convicted.

Vice Mayor Jim Shulman is appointing a special committee of the Metro Council to investigate and explore why the incarceration rate is so high for this zip code. I know this area well. As an employee of Metro Development and Housing Agency in the late 70's and early 80's I worked in this area and then later as a housing counselor with the Woodbine Community Organization, I worked in this area for a long time. A couple of correlating factors I would predict will be discovered if anyone looks, is the rate of out of wedlock births and the low rate of high school graduation.




It's a startling statistic: a North Nashville neighborhood (ZIP code 37208) is said to have the highest incarceration rate in the entire country, according to the Brookings Institution.

Tennessee Bar Association: At 14 percent, the North Nashville zip code ranked three points higher than the next neighborhood on the list, in Portsmith, Virginia. The study’s authors did not examine causation for each geographic area, but cited factors such as family environment, biological stressors associated with poverty and the school-to-prison pipeline as potential connections. 

The Nashville Scene: This is 37208, the heart of historically black North Nashville and a community in which Nashville’s proud progress has often had a poisonous side. The local and federal government’s treatment of North Nashville for at least a century has ranged from neglect to outright racist hostility. Around 50 years ago, the construction of Interstate 40 displaced more than a thousand black residents, destroyed a business and cultural district on Jefferson Street that was thriving against all odds, and slashed across the neighborhood of the 37208 ZIP code, cutting it in half. ......A Brookings Institution study released in March looking at people born between 1980 and 1986 found that in the 37208 ZIP code, 1 out of every 7 people of that generation found themselves imprisoned in their 30s. That’s the highest rate in the country. 

Best Places: Crime in Zip 37208 (Nashville, TN)

Crime is ranked on a scale of 1 (low crime) to 100 (high crime)
Nashville (zip 37208) violent crime is 76.0. (The US average is 22.7)
Nashville (zip 37208) property crime is 75.3. (The US average is 35.4)

Neighborhoodlink.com:  37208 is a urban zip code in Nashville, Tennessee. Median household income here ($19,534) is significantly lower than US average ($56,604). The population is primarily African-American, and mostly single. The average house value here ($106,900) is lower than in the Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin metro area as a whole, so this could be a great place to look for housing bargains.

The Brookings Institute: Economic studies. Work and opportunity before and after incarceration.

...youths from single-parent households are about twice as likely to be incarcerated in their early 30s than youths from married households.....

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