Mapping Incarceration: Using GIS to visualize criminal justice

I am just learning of Eric Cadora’s amazing project in a Village Voice article from 2004: Million-Dollar Blocks: The neighborhood costs of America’s prison boom.

This is a story about creative approaches to social policy and a story about an individual’s dedication to justice. Eric Cadora began using GIS software to visualize the amount of public funds that were being spent on incarcerating individuals in Brooklyn- primarily black males. Some blocks in NYC reflected over five million dollars in state money being spent on incarceration.  Erica Cadora went on to create The Justice Mapping Center in 1998. He learned how to use mapping software, obtained data sets, and created maps.

We specialize in using computer mapping—otherwise known as Geographic Information Systems or GIS—to help our partners better understand, evaluate, and communicate criminal justice and other social policy information. Our mapping studies are used by legislators, government agencies, research institutes, technical assistance providers, and the media.

The center has just launched the First National Atlas of Criminal Justice Data after 2 years in making! This project is so useful for practioners and policy makers working in criminal justice, community organizing, and social workers. I  am really happy to see a project like this because it’s another example of how mapping can be a tool for social change.

Publication of the Atlas means that for the first time, policy makers, researchers, community organizations, media and even departments of corrections themselves now have access to data that geographically illustrates:

• the concentration of incarceration rates in disadvantaged communities all around the country;
• the crucial role that parole and probation revocations play in recycling the same neighborhood residents back to prison each year;
• the millions of dollars per neighborhood being spent to imprison residents of these communities;
• the disparities between the proportion of a city’s population who live in a community and the proportion of the city’s returning prisoners who live in that community.

The Atlas reveals the following kinds of data:

• In New York City, neighborhoods that are home to 18% of the city’s adult population account for more than 50% of prison admissions each year.
• In Wichita, Kansas, where probation and parole revocations account for more than two-thirds of the city’s admissions to prison each year, one-quarter of all people on probation or parole live in only 8% of the city’s neighborhoods.
• In Pennsylvania, taxpayers will spend over $40 million to imprison residents of neighborhoods in a single zip code in Philadelphia, where 38% of households have incomes under $25,000.
• In Shreveport, Louisiana, nearly seven percent of all working age men living in the neighborhoods of a single zip code were sent to prison in 2008.
• In Austin, Texas, while neighborhoods in three of the city’s 41 zip codes are home to only 3.5% of the city’s adult population, they grapple with over 17% of people returning from prison each year.