Do you live on one of Brooklyn's Million Dollar Blocks?
And we don't mean a block where the majority of real estate is pricey or the residents' net worth is at an average of a mill. We are talking about a block where where so many residents are in prison that it costs at least $1 million to incarcerate them.
In Brooklyn in 2003, there were 35 blocks that fit this category. In at least one case, the price tag surpassed $5 million. These blocks are, unsurprisingly, concentrated in the poorest sections of the borough, including East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville.
In 1998, Brooklynite Eric Cadora was working at a nonprofit agency in Manhattan called the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES). He studied the plethora of ways mapping was used, including by the New York City Police Department to identify crime hot spots, and taught himself mapping software.
Cadora says, "People weren't coming at [mapping] from a policy reform perspective. Most of the [of the mapping] was about getting tough." Cadora - being the ultimate Brooklynite that he is - decided to create a new set of maps, which he hoped "would help people envision solutions."
He then began his first mapping project with the criminal-[in]justice data from a state agency on - what else?! - Brooklyn. With the help of colleague Charles Swartz, the two made a series of maps illustrating where inmates come from and how much money is spent to imprison them.
One element makes these maps "conservative." That is, they feature only prison costs—not jail costs. Prisons hold people who have been convicted of a crime; jails, like those on Rikers Island, are for people who have been accused of a crime and are not yet convicted, or for people who have received sentences of one year or less. There would be many more "million-dollar blocks" if jail expenses were factored in or if other criminal-justice costs—like those for probation and parole—were also added.
Word spread. Holla! Today, Cadora's maps are well-known in criminal-justice circles. By now, he and Swartz have made maps for agencies in states throughout the country.
And we don't mean a block where the majority of real estate is pricey or the residents' net worth is at an average of a mill. We are talking about a block where where so many residents are in prison that it costs at least $1 million to incarcerate them.
In Brooklyn in 2003, there were 35 blocks that fit this category. In at least one case, the price tag surpassed $5 million. These blocks are, unsurprisingly, concentrated in the poorest sections of the borough, including East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville.
In 1998, Brooklynite Eric Cadora was working at a nonprofit agency in Manhattan called the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES). He studied the plethora of ways mapping was used, including by the New York City Police Department to identify crime hot spots, and taught himself mapping software.
Cadora says, "People weren't coming at [mapping] from a policy reform perspective. Most of the [of the mapping] was about getting tough." Cadora - being the ultimate Brooklynite that he is - decided to create a new set of maps, which he hoped "would help people envision solutions."
He then began his first mapping project with the criminal-[in]justice data from a state agency on - what else?! - Brooklyn. With the help of colleague Charles Swartz, the two made a series of maps illustrating where inmates come from and how much money is spent to imprison them.
One element makes these maps "conservative." That is, they feature only prison costs—not jail costs. Prisons hold people who have been convicted of a crime; jails, like those on Rikers Island, are for people who have been accused of a crime and are not yet convicted, or for people who have received sentences of one year or less. There would be many more "million-dollar blocks" if jail expenses were factored in or if other criminal-justice costs—like those for probation and parole—were also added.
Word spread. Holla! Today, Cadora's maps are well-known in criminal-justice circles. By now, he and Swartz have made maps for agencies in states throughout the country.
This map, created by Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, illustrates the estimated cost per block for people who entered the state prison system in 2003. To make the map, Cadora and Swartz obtained home addresses and prison sentences—like three to six years—for everyone who was sent to prison in 2003. Then they took each person's minimum sentence (in the above example, that would be three years) and multiplied that number by $30,000 in order to figure out what the total expense will be for his or her incarceration.
The darkest red areas on this map are "million-dollar blocks." In 2003, there were 35 million-dollar blocks in Brooklyn, out of a total of 9,589 blocks.
What would be possible if the $35 million plus that upstate economies received from the incarceration of our residents in 2003 was used within our communities?...
This is worthy of a REBELLION!
Visit the following sites for more info:
1. Columbia University's Spatial Information Design Lab
http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects.php?id=16
http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects.php?id=16
2. The Real Cost of Prisons
3. Jennifer Gonnerman's article in the Village Voice, 11/9/04
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