Million-Dollar Blocks - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 130

Five years later, Eric Cadora of the Center for Alternative Sentencing and
Employment Services made the decisive move to begin acquiring data about incar -
ceration from state criminal justice records themselves in order at once to test these
early cartographic projects at a larger scale and to draw some conclusions: to show
that incarceration is a problem of the city and to demonstrate that policy needed to
address the issue directly. He called the project “justice mapping.” Cadora, working
with Charles Schwarz, produced a different sort of map, one that, as he told Jen -
nifer Gonnerman in the Village Voice , “would help people envision solutions rather
than just critiques.” 65 As Gonnerman reported, “they made a series of maps illus -
trating where inmates come from and how much money is spent to imprison them,”
and there they discovered what came to be called “million-dollar blocks.”
In 2005, a study of million-dollar blocks became the first project of the Spatial
Information Design Lab (SIDL), which I had started the year before at the Graduate
School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Over a
number of years and in a variety of different ways, with dozens of maps of neigh -
borhoods across the United States, the research built on Cadora's project and took
up the challenge of making visible a decidedly spatial phenomenon, but one that
still remained difficult to see.
One reason for the difficulty is that the geography of incarceration is both a
micro and a macro feature of contemporary urbanism. Looking at the block is essen-
tial, but it fails to make much sense unless it's seen within the context of a larger
metropolitan infrastructure of criminal justice and social services...and vice versa.
To show this, Million-Dollar Blocks borrows and inverts the language of crime
“hot spot” maps. Introduced by New York City police commissioner William Brat -
ton in 1994 with the enthusiastic endorsement of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the
COMPSTAT (“computerized statistics”) program used GIS software to map the
locations and times of crimes across New York City.
Million-Dollar Blocks shifts the frame ever so slightly and makes use of other -
wise rarely accessible data, also collected by the criminal justice system, to corrobo-
rate Ellis's early research. Simply by mapping the home addresses of people as they
are admitted to prison, which are also the addresses to which they will most likely
return upon release, and by correlating that with the amount of time they spend in
prison (and hence the cost to the state), “phenomenal facts” indeed emerge.
The maps show the disproportionate concentrations of incarceration in poor
and isolated city blocks across the United States. The project aggregates data and
then zooms in to the microgeographies of those communities, mining existing data
and repurposing it to produce new visual and quantitative meanings. In so doing,
the maps direct viewers to look more closely at certain places, for instance, the
Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, and ask: “What's behind the red polygon?”