Million-Dollar Blocks - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 143

MONEY MAPS
Measured in dollars, the criminal justice network has frequently become the most
important public institution in high-resettlement neighborhoods. The stakes and
impacts of this unacknowledged investment become clearer when we make the
incarceration maps slightly more complex by adding information about the actual
costs of imprisonment. How much money does it cost to keep people in prison?
The figures are available, and when they are correlated with the addresses of the
people on whom the money is being spent, a remarkable pattern emerges.
We call them “million-dollar blocks”: single blocks in inner-city neighborhoods
across the country for which upward of a million dollars is allocated each year to
imprison its residents.
The maps now suggest a link between those places and the dollars spent (else -
where) on their residents. They ask us to weigh the opportunity costs—for each
city block, neighborhood, or wider community—of committing those funds to
recycle people through jail and prison, back home, and then (for more than a third
of them) back inside again. This pattern is visible in all too many major American
cities: New Haven, New Orleans, New York City, Phoenix, and Wichita.
Money spent on criminal justice is money not spent on other civic institutions,
especially in these communities. Guided by the maps of million-dollar blocks,
urban planners, designers, and policy makers can identify those areas in our cities
where—without acknowledging it—we have allowed the criminal justice system
to replace and displace a whole host of other public institutions and civic infra -
structure. Those neglected sectors are the very ones we have already identified
as the collateral damage of the incarceration explosion: education, family, hous -
ing, health, civic involvement. Now the investment pattern and spending priorities
that feed this condition become dramatically evident.
Prisonexpendituresexpressedinmillionsofdollars:Theresultinghistogramdisplayswhatstatisticians
callaPowerLawdistribution,inwhichthelargestshareofthetotalexpenditureisrepresentedbyavery
smallshareofcensusblocks.