incarceration, politics of GIS, y'all should read Laura Kurgan
"The geography of incarceration is both a micro and a macro feature of contemporary urbanism. Looking at the block is essential, 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 Bratton 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 otherwise rarely accessible data, also collected by the criminal justice system, to corroborate 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."
-Laura Kurgan "Close up at a Distance" p. 188
#gis #geography #incarceration