Some inner-city blocks or neighborhoods deserve to be called prison blocks:
Nationwide, an estimated two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within three years. A disproportionate number of them come from a few urban neighborhoods in big cities. Many states spend more than $1 million a year to incarcerate the residents of single blocks or small neighborhoods.One such “million-dollar neighborhood” is shown above—a half-square-mile portion of Central City, an impoverished district southwest of the French Quarter. In 2007, 55 people from this neighborhood entered prison; the cost of their incarceration will likely reach about $2 million.
So, a few clusters of career criminals are responsible for tremendous damage to society. The author’s proposed solution?
The perpetual migration between prison and a few predictable neighborhoods is not only costly — it also destabilizes community life. Some New Orleans officials and community groups are now using prison-admission maps like these to explore new investments — block by block — in the social infrastructure of these damaged neighborhoods. Plenty of money is already being spent on these neighborhoods, in the form of policing and prison costs; the hope is that by spending more money in them, in a highly targeted fashion, the release-and-return-to-prison cycle can eventually be broken.
The author, Laura Kurgan, is the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University. Not surprising.