Credit: Robin Beck/AFP

As a candidate and now as President, Donald Trump has promised to lock more people up. Undocumented immigrants. Drug dealers. Gang members in Chicago. But the tough on crime approach favored by President Trump won’t just hurt people in cities he’s painted as urban hellscapes. New research finds that the areas helping drive America’s rapidly rising incarceration rates are in rural America—areas, in other words, that voted for Trump.

A new report based on data that until recently remained siloed across the country shows that even as cities like New York and Los Angeles have been reducing their jail populations, jails in rural counties—think Campbell County, Tennessee or Boone County, Arkansas—are growing exponentially.

“These places, as we saw in the election, felt overlooked and forgotten,” says study co-author Ram Subramanian, editorial director of the Vera Institute of Justice. “There are a lot of states engaged in criminal justice reform. They have to cater to these places and pay attention.”

Subramanian and co-author Jacob Kang-Brown owe their discovery to Incarceration Trends, […]