Reading Response

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New York, 2012 —Eddie Ellis spent twenty years in prison in New York State. In 1992, just after he had been released and returned to his home in Harlem, he told New York Times reporter Francis X. Clines about research that he and other prisoners had done while incarcerated, research in what the story called “a pris- oner’s ‘think tank’ at Green Haven prison in Stormville, N.Y.”62 Of all that they had learned, a pair of “hard facts” stood out, he said: “the fact that more than 85 percent of prisoners in the state are black or Latino and—most phenomenal of all—that 75 percent of the state’s entire prison population comes from just seven neighborhoods in New York City.” The article, which ran on the front page of the paper two days before Christmas that year, went on to explain that this second fact, “that three out of four prisoners come from, prey upon and return to seven neighborhoods encompassed by just 18 of the state’s 150 Assembly districts, or 12 percent of the population, is at the heart of Mr. Ellis’s new mission as an unaccred- ited street penologist without portfolio.” The story was accompanied by a map, the caption of which read: “Map of New York City, indicating seven neighborhoods where three out of four New York State prisoners come from.” Ellis’s home-grown research mission—and in particular, the map—caught the eye of other scholars and advocates for criminal justice reform. A year later, Lola Odubekun published the Vera Institute Atlas of Crime and Criminal Justice in New York City, which, in addition to its rather predictable crime maps, also included two maps of incarceration: one titled “Rikers Island Inmates by Home Residence, March 1993” and another titled “Distribution of Persons Arrested by Neighborhood of Res- idence, 1989.”63 Although the report noted that “69 percent of the 64,501 inmates in the state prisons were from New York City,”64 and although the maps clearly showed that the vast number of those inmates came from very few neighborhoods in the city, no conclusions were drawn noting the unusual statistical concentration.

Million-Dollar Blocks

The “most phenomenal” fact of all

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Five years later, Eric Cadora of the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services made the decisive move to begin acquiring data about incar- ceration from state criminal justice records themselves in order at once to test these early cartographic projects at a larger scale and to draw some conclusions: to show that incarceration is a problem of the city and to demonstrate that policy needed to address the issue directly. He called the project “justice mapping.” Cadora, working with Charles Schwarz, produced a different sort of map, one that, as he told Jen- nifer Gonnerman in the Village Voice, “would help people envision solutions rather than just critiques.”65 As Gonnerman reported, “they made a series of maps illus- trating where inmates come from and how much money is spent to imprison them,” and there they discovered what came to be called “million-dollar blocks.” In 2005, a study of million-dollar blocks became the first project of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL), which I had started the year before at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Over a number of years and in a variety of different ways, with dozens of maps of neigh- borhoods across the United States, the research built on Cadora’s project and took up the challenge of making visible a decidedly spatial phenomenon, but one that still remained difficult to see. One reason for the difficulty is that the geography of incarceration is both a micro and a macro feature of contemporary urbanism. Looking at the block is essen- tial, but it fails to make much sense unless it’s seen within the context of a larger metropolitan infrastructure of criminal justice and social services . . . and vice versa. To show this, Million-Dollar Blocks borrows and inverts the language of crime “hot spot” maps. Introduced by New York City police commissioner William Brat- ton in 1994 with the enthusiastic endorsement of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the COMPSTAT (“computerized statistics”) program used GIS software to map the locations and times of crimes across New York City. Million-Dollar Blocks shifts the frame ever so slightly and makes use of other- wise rarely accessible data, also collected by the criminal justice system, to corrobo- rate Ellis’s early research. Simply by mapping the home addresses of people as they are admitted to prison, which are also the addresses to which they will most likely return upon release, and by correlating that with the amount of time they spend in prison (and hence the cost to the state), “phenomenal facts” indeed emerge. The maps show the disproportionate concentrations of incarceration in poor and isolated city blocks across the United States. The project aggregates data and then zooms in to the microgeographies of those communities, mining existing data and repurposing it to produce new visual and quantitative meanings. In so doing, the maps direct viewers to look more closely at certain places, for instance, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, and ask: “What’s behind the red polygon?”

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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.

why are so many americans in jail and prison?

Since 1970, Americans have been living in an era of what some have called mass incarceration, one of the “greatest social experiments of our time.”66 The crime rate in America over the course of the last century has moved up and down in a peri- odic wave. The corresponding rates at which Americans have been incarcerated look very different. In contrast to the periodic undulations of the crime rate, the incarceration rate remained constant for most of the century.

Crime rates form a relatively

self-consistent wave of activity.

Incarceration rates remain relatively

constant until 1970, when a radical

upward trend is driven by policy.

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From the late 1970s, however, it has been climbing rapidly. The result has been a tenfold increase in the standing prison population, from two hundred thousand in 1970 to two million in 2000.67 How we respond to crime is a matter of values, deci- sions, and policy, all the way down to the basic questions defining what counts as a crime. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, efforts to fight poverty were systematically replaced by the War on Drugs, including the criminalization of most drug offenses. Crime became the surrogate for poverty and incarceration the primary response.

Poverty policy in the United States

since 1900.

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from data to maps

A criminal justice data set is most commonly maintained and presented as a list. It is designed to track people as individual cases. As individuals make their way through the system, information is entered into a database and accumulates: name, crime, length of sentence, home address, and so on. Individually, the infor- mation forms a portrait of a case. Aggregated, the cases create a statistical portrait of a society. When maps are made from data such as these, they often stop at the very first element: what crimes were committed and where. Crime maps have played a sig- nificant role in the public discourse on cities over the last thirty years. These maps have, in fact, become one of the most prominent instruments through which we understand and interpret our cities.

Excerpt from database,

www.chicagocrime.org.

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According to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), “mapping crime can help law enforcement protect citizens more effectively in the areas they serve. Simple maps that display the locations where crimes or concentrations of crimes have occurred can be used to help direct patrols to places they are most needed. Policy- makers in police departments might use more complex maps to observe trends in criminal activity.”68

Mapping the data about the location of crimes has prompted successful cam- paigns to transform urban policing from a reactive, calls-for-service approach to an active community policing strategy focused on so-called high-crime locations. Crime maps collect individual incidents over time to identify “hot spots,” places that can become the focus of intense police—and political—attention. As the NIJ report puts it (candidly, if rather casually): “using maps that help people visualize the geographic aspects of crime, however, is not limited to law enforcement. Map- ping can provide specific information on crime and criminal behavior to politicians, the press, and the general public.”69

Typical crime map, from www.chicagocrime.org. Criminal events, not people, are mapped to the city.

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from crime maps to admissions maps

If crime maps succeeded dramatically in mobilizing public opinion—redefining the city as a mosaic of safe and unsafe spaces and forcing the reallocation and target- ing of police resources on specific neighborhoods—the gains were short-lived. The resulting crime prevention techniques and the community policing movement in general soon reached the inevitable limits of any purely tactical approach. The city spaces that were targeted became safer, but too often, crime incidents were simply displaced to other locations.

Crime density map, Brooklyn, New York, 1998.

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By focusing solely on events, the human underpinnings of crime were left largely unaffected. When we shift the maps’ focus from crime events to incarcera- tion events, strikingly different patterns become visible. The geography of prison differs in important ways from the geography of crime. Diffused and dispersed across the city, crime happens in many different places. But the people who are convicted and imprisoned for urban crimes are often quite densely concentrated geographically.

Prison admissions density map, Brooklyn, New York, 2003.

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The crime rates in the most affected precincts are typically four times higher than the lowest. But the highest-incarceration-rate precincts show activity upward of ten times higher than those of the lowest-incarceration-rate precincts. Like pov- erty, incarceration is spatially concentrated, and much more so than crime. It is as if by imprisoning the residents of these neighborhoods—making them disappear from their city—we were simply mirroring the disappearance of the conversation on poverty.

Prison admissions by census tract, Brooklyn, New York, 2003.

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Just as the incarceration rate tracks the eclipse of that debate, the geographical inquiry into criminal justice in the city uncovers the territory of the juxtaposi- tion between crime and poverty. Focusing on where incarcerated people live when they are not in prison and comparing that with poverty suggests this conjunc- tion rather starkly. Is incarceration policy the new solution to poverty, or a new structural component?

Population living in poverty by census tract, Brooklyn, New York, 2000.

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redefining the problem: mass migration and reentry

Six hundred thousand people return from prison each year in the United States, and millions more come home from jails.70 About two hundred and forty thousand of the released prisoners—roughly 40 percent—will return to prison within three years.71 In and out, they come and go, all too often simply cycling back and forth between the same places. New maps can help us grasp this extraordinary phenom- enon: prison migration, and with it, high-resettlement communities. When crime maps are replaced by incarceration maps, we can finally visualize the geography of

Prisoner migration patterns, Brooklyn to New York State, 2003.

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a massive migration: the flow of people in and out of the city. We can ask whether this quiet but pervasive migration crisis isn’t creating a growing class of non- citizens, concentrated in very few places in all of our major cities. The new visual- izations reveal what was previously difficult to see—the mass disappearance and reappearance of people in the city. They focus on the systematic phenomenon of ex-prisoners’ reentry and examine new institutions that respond to this structural feature of urban life. What happens to these people when they come home? We often know where they are going and what will happen. What is our responsibility to resettle them effectively, given all that we know?

Prisoner migration patterns, Brooklyn, New York, 2003.

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Excerpt from a database of New York City prisoners by home address with expenditures added

[data has been scrambled].

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.

Prison expenditures expressed in millions of dollars: The resulting histogram displays what statisticians

call a Power Law distribution, in which the largest share of the total expenditure is represented by a very

small share of census blocks.

Prison expenditures by census block in Brooklyn,

New York, 2003.

Thirty-one men, 4.4 million dollars, four blocks

of Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York, 2003.

criminal justice as infrastructure

No matter how physically removed they are from the neighborhoods of the peo- ple they hold, the urban exostructure of prisons and jails remain firmly rooted as institutions of the city, as everyday parts of life for people, affecting their homes, social networks, and movements. An analysis of any million-dollar block will demonstrate how the overlapping resources of these networks conflate individuals and infrastructure, the local and the global, the close and the far, the piece and the system. Doing anything here— attempting to restructure the way the criminal justice system works—means working with contingent, dynamic, and overlapping systems and collaborations between multiple agencies, tools, and techniques. What does it mean to design policy, to design multiple policies, around a single place? The maps are both a picture and a design strategy. The picture is an aggregate situation. The design strategy is “start from the block and build,” incrementally, new networks that might inform this crippled urban infrastructure. In this way, these maps depart radically from the maps and statistical analy- ses that fueled mid-twentieth-century efficient city, urban renewal, and policing projects. The map is not a top-down view. And neither is it a bottom-up account. It is both. Identify an area. Zoom in and examine the specific conditions. Zoom out and then consider both scales at the same time. The resulting image is no longer hard data. It is a soft map that is infinitely scalable, absolutely contingent, open to vision and hence revision.

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