Million Dollar Blocks

[kpete]

This is fascinating and important.


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The Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition which displayed the maps created by the Justice Mapping Center. The name of the exhibition was “Architecture and Justice, from the Million Dollar Blocks project. 2006”

..........

The description of the exhibition reads as follows:

Of the more than two million people incarcerated in jails and prisons in the United States, a disproportionate number came from very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of sing city blocks. Using rarely accessible date from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city-prison-city-prison migration flow of five of the nation’s cities. “The maps pose difficult ethical and political question for policy makers and designers,” explains Kurgan. “When they are linked to other urban, social, and economic indicators of incarceration, they also suggest new strategies for approaching urban design and criminal justice reform together.”

The graphics are staggering.





Much more:
http://milliondollarblocks.tumblr.com/

[spanone]

1. when you privatize prisons, crime truly pays.

[dsc]

2. private prisons are a problem

but not in the context of the OP. New York doesn't have them so they can't be responsible for the imprisonment of people from Brooklyn.

[KamaAina]

3. True, however most NY prisons are upstate

generally in small towns where they are the lifeblood of the economy. Same thing here in CA. So there's still a financial incentive to incarcerate.