Million Dollar Blocks (2005)

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New York City and Wichita, KS, are among the many cities in the United States in which the state regularly spends more than one million dollars to incarcerate prisoners who live within a single census block. Advocacy organizations, city planners, and community groups working with released prisoners are asking: where are these ‘million dollar blocks,’ and what’s happening there? The Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) at Columbia is working with the Justice Mapping Center to produce a range of maps of this phenomenon.

Million Dollar Blocks is the first of a series of projects to be undertaken by the Spatial Information Design Lab at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP), as part of a two year research and development project on Graphical Innovation in Justice Mapping. It activates a unique partnership between the Justice Mapping Center (JMC), the JFA Institute (JFA), and the GSAPP, enabling the Justice Mapping Center to refine analytical and graphical techniques within the research environment of the Spatial Information Design Lab, which can then be applied to real life policy initiatives through work with the JFA Institute. Reciprocally, input from state and local leaders is then brought back to the Design Lab for further development. This feedback loop is 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.

The project, has been funded by the JEHT Foundation and by the Open Society Institute