An unsettlingly large number of the over 2 million people who are incarcerated in the US come from just a few small swaths of this country’s urban areas. Known as “million dollar blocks”, these neighborhoods are places where states spend over a million dollars to jail inmates – places where the most visible and active arm of government is often the criminal justice system.
This is not a new concept – but I’ve noticed a number of really well-done projects and pieces of journalism that have applied mapping and data visualization to tell the stories of million dollar blocks – and, in doing so, the intertwined stories of economic inequality and our country’s swelling prison system. The concept lends itself perfectly to mapping: intriguing and pressing attribute data that only comes alive when tied to its physical place on the ground.
One intriguing experiment in this space is Million Dollar Blocks – a project of the Columbia University Spatial Design Lab and The Justice Mapping Center. They’ve done what looks like a great job of opening up government data on incarceration and churning out elegantly designed and communicative visualizations (see embedded image of million dollar blocks in Brooklyn, NY).
And in the journalism world, the authors of this 2004 piece in NYC’s Village Voice pulled together their own map of million dollar neighborhoods in Brooklyn – which was used to great effect in the power of their piece. It should be noted, too, that they went to additional lengths to be transparent about the making of their map, here.
The Columbia University Spatial Design Lab notes that these visualizations are “a valuable tool resulting in new methods of spatial analyses and ways of visually presenting them that reveal previously unseen dimensions of criminal justice and related government policies in states across the United States.” Agreed. The potential for mapping and visualization to grease the wheels of communication between policy makers and the people, communities and organizations that deal with their policy outcomes appears to be huge.
If open data and low-cost mapping tools can get into the right hands in 2010, hopefully there will be ample opportunity to come up with some evidence to back that projection up.
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