Million Dollar Blocks @milliondollarblocks-blog - Tumblr Blog

MOMA Exhibit

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"

According to the MOMA website Lauren Kurgan, Eric Adora, David Reinfurt and Sarah Williams contributed to the exhibition. They worked in conjunction with Spatial Information Design Lab, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

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 te 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."

#million dollar blocks

This image displays the million dollar blocks of Brownsville, Brooklyn

Visit Original Link

This is an NPR All Things Considered interview which helps to explain the concept of Million Dollar Blocks.

What we mapped was not a big surprise to people. But when you actually gather the real data and the real numbers, and you put them on maps, they become immediately understandable to people who didn't see it - like legislators, city council people, researchers. They become - almost urban planners; and start to ask questions like, oh, well, look at all the resources around this million-dollar area, but they're not being used well. How can we take those resources, and then seek to strengthen them; rather than come in blind with some kind of - sort of giant service center that doesn't really link with what's already going on in those neighborhoods.

-Erica Cadora, Co-founder of the Justice Mapping Center

Brownsville, Brooklyn and the Revolving Door of Prisons

In the specific case of Brownsville, Brooklyn, the maps have contributed to local officials further investment in local communities and organizations in order to not make million dollar blocks a normalized phenomena. People could not pinpoint what was going on in their community, and had no way to prove the extent of the damage being done. These maps are a start to information people can point to and demand things be changed. The maps demonstrate the concentration of areas affected by incarceration. The state from a decade ago has taken these maps into consideration and made an effort to strengthen the community at a local level to affect change in the other direction. The maps make it harder ignore the problem of concentrated incarceration rates; it makes them visible and undeniable. This un-deniability leads to increased focus on helping ex-prisoners break the vicious cycle that makes prisons into revolving doors.

Cost of the Prison Boom on Local Neighborhoods

The following is a portion of a telling article written by Jennifer Gonnerman about a tenant’s take on what is going on in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His take helps to draw a connection between the maps and social going-ons in this area. The original article is entitled “Million Dollar Blocks: The neighborhood Costs of America’s Prison Boom,” published in the Village Voice.

One Tenant Leader's Take

Ronald Ward was has never heard of "million dollar block," but he's lived on one for years in the Howard Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn. When he talks about crime, he doesn't talk about statistics or dollars or maps. He talks about what he's seen: young men selling drugs out of his lobby; parole officers who have become a regular presence in his project; men who have come home from long prison stays, only to end up selling drugs once again."Most of the crime is committed against the people who live here, the muggings, the burglaries," says Ward, 61, a tenant leader who has been living in the Howard Houses for 43 years. "Crime here is really so rampant." There is one particular crime that he is less eager to discuss. Fourteen years ago, his 20-year-old son was out driving a cab when two men got in, pointed a gun at him, then shot him in the head. His son died three weeks later. "Losing a child,I had never experienced that kind of trauma," he says.

When Ward learned that he lived on a million-dollar block, he wasn't surprised. Many of his project's residents go to work every day, he says, but "we've got people with problems." Empty refrigerators, crack addiction, illiteracy. If legislators asked him how to stop the cycle of imprisonment, he says he'd tell them: "Stop the racism." And he'd advise them to improve the schools. "If you don't educate people, you keep them powerless," he says. "They need to understand the system they're living in. When people become aware of that, then they can get out of it." J.G.

This excerpt also appears in the book Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration.

Why are million dollar blocks important to consider?

Million dollar blocks are a good way to visualize where crime is happening and what populations it affects. Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness contends that “the war on drugs” is the New Jim Crow. This argument says that the criminal justice system in the United States is highly racist. By tracking what populations are being cycled in and out for non-violent charges such as drug offenses, we can decide if we agree with her contention. The million dollar blocks support the idea that the current criminal justice system is racist and carries on the discrimination against black people felt throughout the history of the United States. We can not only consider her argument, but we can look to scholars such as David Oshinsky, Bruce Western, Ruth Gilmore and Marie Gottschalk to give some historical, political and socio-economic history and context the present state of the penal system in the United States. Million dollar blocks are channeling money into population control when many other facets of society are failing. Why not use the millions of dollars spent on the incarceration of a single city block, back into that community to improve education as well as employment opportunities?

How to learn more about million dollar blocks around the country?

The Justice Mapping center started by Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz has been collecting information since 199. They are based out of New York and are a great resource to learn about million dollar blocks. The description of their mission on their website is as follows:“

"The Justice Mapping Center uses computer mapping and other graphical depictions of quantitative date to analyze and communicate social policy information. Our approach is based on the plain fact that American society is stratified and that where people live is a direct expression of those different social and economic strata. Therefore, criminal justice, social welfare, and economic development policies are intimately related to particular jurisdictions, neighborhoods, and locales. Our goal is to help our partners add these socio-geographic dimension o their work. We use maps to:

Reveal hidden patterns and realities that tables and charts leave unrecognized.

Create place-based measures of performance that build shared goals among separate agencies.

Provide compelling visualizations of policies that are easily understood by a wide variety of constituents.”

The National Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Corrections is also a great resource created by the Justice Mapping center that provides information on specific areas o the United States. “The Justice Atlas is a corrections data driven, interactive mapping tool. It is designed to contribute to our knowledge of place-base dimension of incarceration, reentry and community supervision in states around the country,” it differs from other crime mapping because it does not map crimes and where they occur but rather focuses on residential patterns within the population who go to prison and then return home.

http://www.justiceatlas.org/

What is the legacy of million dollar blocks?

After the post World War II de-industrialization, urban centers were left socially and economically devastated. People were left un-employed and without means for taking care of themselves and their families. The U.S. government saw this surplus population and panicked. They searched for a form of population cost in order to curb this surplus labor supply as they saw it. Looking at their black citizens as surplus-labor as opposed to human being effectively played into the “war on drugs” also referred to as the New Jim Crow (Alexander). This history preceding “the war on drugs” and “the prison boom” is well outline by Ruth Gilmore. She gives a socio-economic account of the history of prisons using California as her case study(Gilmore). Essentially the surplus labor after World War II alongside with the four racist peculiar institutions that have controlled black people since the slavery era, work in conjunction to explain the plight of poor urban communities in he United States.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. Reprint. New Press, The, 2012. Print.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. 1st ed. University of California Press, 2007. Print.

#million dollar blocks #de-industrialization #urban centers #war on drugs #Ruth Gilmore

What is a Million Dollar Block?

The Justice Mapping Center based out of New York has been collecting information about incarceration rates of many prison systems in relation to geographical locations. They collect data on individual inmates, where they reside, how often they are in imprisoned, and how much their imprisonment costs. This information is then used to create maps, which make visible the amount of money spent in different residential areas. In areas such as Brownsville, Brooklyn over $1 million dollars is being spent annually on the incarceration of a single city block.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Million Dollar Blocks