Million-Dollar Blocks - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 131

WHAT ARE MILLION-DOLLAR BLOCKS? OR, JUSTICE AND THE CITY
New York, 2006— The United States currently has more than two million people
locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a
very few neighborhoods in the country's biggest cities. In many places, the con -
centration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars per
year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. When these people are
released and reenter their communities, roughly 40 percent do not stay more than
three years before they are reincarcerated.
Using rarely accessible data from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Infor -
mation Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these
“million-dollar blocks” and the city-prison-city-prison migration flow for five of
the nation's cities. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become
the predominant government institution in these communities and that public
investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our
civic infrastructure: education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form
the distant exostructure of many American cities today.
Have prisons and jails become the mass housing of our time? How has the War
on Drugs affected incarceration rates? What are the differences between crime
maps and prison admission maps? What are the relationships between prison pop-
ulations and poor communities? Has incarceration become a response to poverty,
rather than to crime? What are the relationships between jailed populations and
homeless ones?
The relationships implied by these questions become evident when criminal
justice data is aggregated geographically and visualized in maps. The focus shifts
away from a case-by-case analysis of the crime and punishment of an individual,
away from the geographic notation of crime events, and toward a geography of
incarceration and return.
The maps pose difficult ethical and political questions for policy makers and
policy designers. When they are linked to other urban, social, and economic indi -
cators of incarceration, they also suggest new strategies for approaching urban
design and criminal justice reform together.