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MILLION DOLLAR BLOCKS
THE PROBLEM
Take a look at census blocks 253 and 254 in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or at a couple of neighborhoods in New Haven, or in New Orleans. It's almost invisible to the naked eye, but with the help of the right data and some mapping software, a strange picture emerges. A lot of the people are missing
or rather, temporarily displaced.
The studio will address this contemporary condition, which is at once a problem of data, representation, cities, policy, and social justice. It is an opportunity to produce new maps, new designs, and new analyses, and with them to imagine new ways of confronting and transforming this strange situation.
The missing men from Bedford Stuyvesant are, the data show, "upstate." They are in prison. The number of imprisoned Americans has exploded over the last twenty-five years, from 200,000 in 1974 to 2,000,000 in 2000. But they do not stay there: ninety-five percent of people sent to prison are eventually released, and each year about 600,000 are sent back from prisons to their communities. But they do not stay there, either: almost two-thirds of those returning from prison are back within three years.
They go back and forth between the same places. The path they follow, to and from, does not vary much: in most major American cities, mass incarceration is highly concentrated in a few, low-income, inner city neighborhoods. In each of these census blocks, a regular stream of residents is removed and returned each year, creating an ongoing mass migration.
In another time and place, this mass movement of displaced people might be called a refugee crisis or a humanitarian emergency. But here, it is our everyday -- and more or less permanent -- urban condition.
This migration system has serious implications for the city. The prison has become the most important institution of these neighborhoods -- but it is not inside them. And so we are spending hundreds of thousands, and in some cases over a million dollars, a year per city or census block to fund this flow, without any of that investment in the urban sites themselves. In Brooklyn in 2003, there were 35 blocks where so many people were sent to prison that the total cost of their incarceration will exceed a million dollars a block. Residents of these communities are becoming permanent consumers of the criminal justice system.
THE PROJECT
What happens in and to cities is not simply determined by their physical forms, but by a complex of factors including information, economic and political forces, structures, and people. This studio will give priority to and operate within an environment of information, beginning with the premise that our imagination of the city is limited only by the manner in which information is made available to those who might do something with and about it. The ways in which data is rendered, visualized, and interpreted have very real consequences for cities, and other places.
Our lens for this approach to the city, and to the ways in which information builds things, will be the contemporary American criminal justice system. We have an unusual opportunity to work with experienced analysts and advocates, who come to us armed with hard-to-find data and a strong sense of the contemporary policy conditions.
THE DATA
Traditional analyses of criminal justice data and information about poor neighborhoods have been mired in static representations of disadvantage. As it turns out, these predictable and unimaginative analyses have important consequences for the kinds of solutions that policymakers and the public can envision: more drug treatment centers, job training programs, halfway housing. These remedial and exceptionalist responses reproduce the humiliation of the welfare line, while leaving the communities socially isolated, politically disenfranchised, and economically disinvested.
Now, GIS and other graphical analysis techniques can reveal different contours, patterns, and textures of this phenomenon. Working with new data and maps, citizens, advocates, and policy-makers can imagine previously-unthinkable responses. These images give us new sites for design and intervention, new opportunities to interrupt and challenge the urban structures which create the million-dollar block and the incarceration-migration system.
DATA MINING
Data, despite the name, are not 'given.' Presentation, interpretation, and imagination -- thinking about, and working with, data -- matter most of all. Students will be expected to experiment with an unusual, and rare, collection of political, economic, and social data, and to think about what they mean for our cities. Changing the functions, creating new analyses, and taking the leaps that reveal new relationships and applications will be the key to using these new data sets to construct new landscapes.
Our process will begin with what is commonly called "data mining." We will investigate data sets that are too often presented to portray poverty, fear, liability, and risk. By exploring them with the help of techniques that aggregate, analyze, and create linkages across disparate collections of information, we will look for other patterns and other pictures. Our work will put the emphasis on dynamic interactions, flow, exchange, and the play of forces, rather than on stasis (or cyclic reversal, which amounts to the same thing) and "culture."
THE PROCESS
We will begin our work by familiarizing ourselves with the relevant data, and learning to use advanced GIS software for mapping and visualizing spatial data. The results will be a series of maps and projects which will expose new sites for programming and design. We will collaborate with some of the pioneers in "justice mapping" to facilitate imaginative and risk-taking views of some of the most pressing problems of cities today.
Our work will incorporate four themes as its guiding concepts: investment,
institutions, migration, and security. These concepts will orient and direct our work with the data, across a range of scales. Regional patterns, block formations, sidewalks, and the inside of apartments in many American cities are all equally important in our work. Students will be expected to build their projects with the data.
KEY WORDS:
INVESTMENT. Although people go to prison as individuals, because of what they have done (or are found to have done) individually, the concentration of so many individuals from small places in prison amounts, in retrospect, to a large-scale social policy about these places. When we aggregate the costs associated with incarceration geographically, we find "million dollar blocks," single census blocks for which we spend up to a million dollars, or sometimes more, a year to remove and return residents to and from prison.
None of this spending is invested in those places where the prison population 'lives.' It goes upstate, or out-of-town, to the prisons, and so the urban communities remain unchanged, despite the money being spent on behalf of their inhabitants. There is a clear analytic difference between, on the one hand, the money that supports the temporary warehousing of people in prison, and the ongoing population transfer that reproduces this temporary condition year in and year out, and on the other hand, an investment policy that builds public safety equity and grows it overtime. So, at the macro level, this amounts to a de facto social investment pattern, albeit a strange one. We can ask: how could this short-term and short-sighted spending policy be contrasted with genuine long-term investments? For example, how would we represent rent vs. home mortgage payments? How can we portray the difference between investment that builds equity capital and spending that doesn't?
Data: Students will be provided with data about length of prison sentences and per diem costs of incarceration, as well as social and economic data about the source neighborhoods and imagery of the blocks. We will develop ways of representing spending data as it exists now and investment as it could be imagined.
INSTITUTIONS. Incarceration dominates life in high-resettlement communities. Prisons are integral to the community, yet they are not in it. The prisons must function as "total institutions," reproducing most aspects of daily life, but for a population of temporary residents. Prisoners are "warehoused," and the industrial metaphor opens up a host of new dimensions in the age of just-in-time delivery, inventory tracking, and flow control. What are the components of the prison? How can data about these elements be represented and re-organized in ways that make meaningful connections with the communities they affect, and perhaps suggest new kinds of American inner-city institutions?
Data: Students will be provided with detailed budgets of state prisons, breaking down costs associated with functions such as food, housing, laundry, security, recreation, etc., as well as data on community institutions such as social service centers, laundromats, youth centers, banks, housing stock, etc. The project here is to reformulate these datasets into combinations that are suggestive of new collective institutions, i.e., total institution functions re-distributed and responsive neighborhood needs.
MIGRATION. The mass incarceration experiment of the last 25 years has resulted in a system in which thousands of residents from a few inner-city neighborhoods are sent to prison and jail each year, and thousands return to their home communities. This has created a pattern of emigration/immigration, which for the most part remains an invisible or not-yet-visualized urban condition. The scale and volume of this activity constitutes a new "great American migration," even a sort of refugee crisis or internal exodus. What does this migration look like? How can its ebbs and flows be represented? What are the implications of the disruption in familial, social, and economic networks? And what are the effects of the diffusion of prison culture into the neighborhoods? Must solutions be restricted to "stabilizing" these communities? Or can they be structured to take advantage of a dynamic movement of people?
Data: Students will be provided with data about the volume of prison admissions and the location of prisons. We will try to visualize this migration, perhaps by comparing it in nature and scope to historical American migrations (e.g., southern blacks to the north, the dustbowl migration to the west, the migration from the inner city to the suburbs, etc
) or to the mass movements of people displaced by conflict, calamity, or famine. We may look to epidemiological models for describing the spread of disease, as a correlate to the spread of violent prison behavior. The goal will be to take static representations of social networks and transform them into dynamic animations of everyday life as structured by migration.
SECURITY. "Security is the great commodity of our time," writes Jonathan Simon in Poor Discipline. Government is often defined by its ability to manage our security through labor market-based systems like unemployment insurance, social security, workers' compensation, and centralized banking. But for unemployed and under educated populations living life outside the labor market, security comes in the form of detention and imprisonment. However, monolithic, expensive forms of control like prisons for poor neighborhoods are increasingly being called on to account for their efficiency, especially in the face of successful security techniques like gated communities for well-off neighborhoods. As prisons give way to calls for less expensive and more sophisticated forms of security, "incarcerated communities" will likely see an increase in security measures, such as substance abuse testing, electronic monitoring, global positioning satellite tracking, and increased freedom to stop, search, and detain. This community containment form of security is best described within a "waste management" model.
How can the opposing forms of security that distinguish neighborhoods with strong labor market networks from those that are economically isolated be represented? What distinguishes communities that gate people out from ones that gate people in? How do we represent security that maximizes mobility for residents of some neighborhoods while restricting the access for residents of others? Can we envision other forms of "security investment" that provide enriching alternatives to the waste management model?
Data: Students will be provided with location data about parolees and probationers linked to specific parole/probation officers, and about office locations vis-à-vis high-resettlement neighborhoods. We will make use of prison admission data to help us characterize low-frequency/high-intensity surveillance. We will look for data about tracked activity for residents of better-off neighborhoods (e.g., credit card use, driver license data), i.e. high frequency/low intensity tracking, for comparative purposes. Surveillance imagery, as well as law enforcement and social services data, will also be available.
Kirtley Cameron
Eunice Kim
John Liu
Charles Miles
Brian Walker
Tsing Lan Yang
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