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Interactive Tool Reveals Counties, Not Cities, Lock Up the Highest Proportions Of People
We’ve known for a long time that state prisons have been built more often in rural areas than in urban areas; that prisons have been job creators in post-industrial America. We also have known that county jails have been built and expanded, too in the era of mass incarceration.
What we have not known, until now, is that county jails in rural areas have been doing much of the heavy lifting in terms of warehousing America’s prisoners.
The distinction between state prisons and county jail is important. When the state sentences someone they are free to ship them anywhere in the state. But when a county sentences someone, or a state sentence is two years or less, the time is served in the county in which the offense occurred. So, one would expect that incarceration rates across counties would be fairly uniform. Also, if the stereotype of the more dangerous urban milieu is to be upheld, we might expect higher rates of incarceration in urban counties. Not so.
A remarkable study by the Vera Institute In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails, reveals that incarceration has grown the most outside of the largest counties and the largest cities.
“While the largest jails—such as those in NYC, LA, and Cook County, often draw the most attention and are the ones most often discussed by policymakers and the media, Vera found that these jails have not grown the most, nor are they among the ones with the highest incarceration rates,” explains Vera Institute.”
Instead, mid-sized and small counties have largely driven growth. Generally, jail populations growing faster than prison populations.
Overall, there has been more than a four-fold increase in the number of people held in jail, from 157,000 to 690,000, since 1970.
“Large counties [jail rates] grew by 2.8 times, while mid-sized counties more than quadrupled, and small counties experienced almost a seven-fold increase,” reports the Vera Institute.
A VISUALISATION TOOL FOR US ALL
In addition to the surprising results of the report is the way in which Vera Institute has rolled out the findings. They’ve launched an interactive tool.
In the video at the top of this post, Vera Researcher Christian Henrichson discusses the Incarceration Trends tool.
We’ve known for a some years that the data for open and manipulable interactives has been available, but verifying the data, filling in the absent data (which happens a lot through different jurisdictions) and then standardising the data for a software program to convert it to user friendly format takes a lot of time, some cash and a good amount of skills. Vera Institute’s work here should propel us forward.
I contend that data visualisation is as essential, if not more so than photography in terms of informing citizens about the prison industrial complex.
In journalism, Gabriel Dance, at the Marshall Project, is making strides in presenting data for the public, for example Next One To Die. In advocacy, the Prison Policy Initiative has done much in wrangling data on county, state, federal, ICE and private facilities. In art, Josh Begley’s Prison Map and Paul Rucker’s Proliferation have both tried to present the terrifying growth of the PIC in ways that engage gallery goers and screen viewers alike. (It should be noted both Rucker’s work are based on the PPI data.) I’m certain there are other practitioners in these fields and more trying to present data and imagery in engaging ways for us out here.
OTHER VERA INSTITUTE FINDINGS
Within the surprising city/county upturn of conventional wisdom, are these two disturbing trends:
- African Americans make up nearly 40 percent of the jail population. African Americans have the highest incarceration rates, particularly in mid-sized and small counties.
- Female incarceration rates have skyrocketed, and are highest in the smallest counties. Since 1970, there has been more than a 14-fold increase in the number of women held in jail, from fewer than 8,000 women in 1970 to 110,000 women in 2014.
DATA HAS THE RIGHT TO PEOPLE
Essential to criminal justice reform efforts is reliable information. The Vera’s Incarceration Trends tool provides easy comparisons on incarceration data for counties nationwide.
I anticipate this new tool will prepare the public, inform legislators and arm activists. As Henrichson encourages, go check out what’s happening in your county
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Read the report in full In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails. Check out the accompanying fact sheet, and visit trends.vera.org to research yourself.
More coverage: Who is Putting the Most People in Jail? Not New York, Chicago, or LA. (The Marshall Project)
For the last 30 years, there have been clear regional differences in states’ use of the prison, with the southern states relying on the prison the most often. (See larger.)
The small, independent and incredibly effective Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) has delivered us a great service once more.
Not content with *only* filing lawsuits, pressing states to move away from Prison Based Election Gerrymandering; battling corrupt and expensive jail phone systems; and protecting prisoners’ rights to communicate unhindered by letter, PPI is committed to providing fellow prison reformers with accurate up-to-date data on mass incarceration. We cannot rely on the governmet to provide recent data.
“Until 2006, researchers, advocates, and policymakers could rely on state-level race and ethnicity incarceration rate data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics “Prisons and Jails at Midyear” series. Unfortunately, these state-level statistics have not been updated in eight years,” says PPI.
PPI has used data from the more recent 2010 U.S. Census counts to measure each state’s incarceration rates by race and ethnicity. Most (57%) people incarcerated in the United States have been convicted of violating state law and are imprisoned in a state prison. Monitoring trends at the state-level is imperative.
“State-level policy choices have been the largest driver of our unprecedented national experiment with mass incarceration,” says PPI. “Each state is responsible for making its own policy choices about which people to lock up and how for long. We can’t end our nation’s experiment with mass incarceration without grappling with the wide variety of state-level criminal justice policies, practices and trends.”
As such, PPI published yesterday the most comprehensive breakdown of demographics in our state prison systems to date. In three distinct sections:
Tracking State Prison Growth in 50 States
50 State Incarceration Profiles
In total, PPI has published 316 new charts, graphs and maps for an accurate view of our shameful, expensive and failed recent history of imprisonment.
Kudos to Peter Wagner, Leah Sakala and all the PPI staff.
Two million voters disenfranchised in key swing states. Something to think on this week and next.
via Prison Policy Initiative
An inmate talks on the phone at San Quentin State Prison, California, June 8, 2012. © REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
Everybody knows prisoners are routinely ripped off by the phone provider/dept. of corrections contracts across the States. Yet, it’s not something I’ve dealt with in depth here at Prison Photography (except for a brief bout of disgust toward a foolish Gaga music vid.)
Why does the cost of telephone contact matter?
Research has routinely showed that the maintenance of family ties during incarceration is the biggest factor in helping former prisoners break the cycle of recidivism and imprisonment.
“Currently, the high rates charged in most states can force the families of incarcerated people to choose between keeping in touch with a relative behind bars and putting food on the table,” says Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative.
The Prison Policy Initiative, recently published The Price To Call Home: State-Sanctioned Monopolization In The Prison Phone Industry, an extensive report on the exorbitant telephone charges levied upon prisoners. The details are shocking. Non-competitive – and arguably corrupt – agreements exist between private phone companies and the state prison systems with whom they contract.
“Prison phone companies are awarded monopolies through bidding processes in which they submit proposals to the state prison systems; in all but eight states, these contracts include promises to pay “commissions” – in effect, kickbacks – to states, in either the form of a percentage of revenue, a fixed upfront payment, or a combination of the two,” writes Drew Kukorwoski, the PPI report author.
The vast differences in phone rates is evidence enough of a piecemeal and unregulated approach. PPI details:
“In many states, someone behind bars must pay about $15 for a fifteen minute phone call. […] Rates vary widely between states — even between states that use the same prison phone company. A fifteen minute long-distance phone call from Global Tel*Link costs $2.36 in Massachusetts, but that same call costs more than $17 in Georgia. This large difference in rates originates in large part from the wide range — anywhere from 15% to 60% — in the size of kickbacks that prison phone companies pay to state governments.”
One day after the release of the PPI report, Costly Phone Calls for Inmates, a New York Times editorial noted that New York state prohibited the practice of kick backs and that the Federal prison system uses a computerised and affordable phone system. Such examples lead me to think that there is no excuse for the flagrant extortion of millions of prisoners and their families.
So, which are the companies behind this ignored corner of the prison industrial complex? What does this monopoly look like? Kukorowski for PPI:
“Over the past few years, three corporations have emerged to dominate the market. 90% of incarcerated persons live in states with prison phone service that is exclusively controlled by Global Tel*Link, Securus Technologies, or CenturyLink. The largest of these corporations, Global Tel*Link, currently has contracts for 27 state correctional departments after its acquisition of four smaller prison phone companies between 2009 and 2011. Global Tel*Link-controlled states contain approximately 57% of the total state population of incarcerated people in the United States. Government regulation was designed to control this kind of corporate domination over a captive market.”
The report was cited in a letter from Congress members Reps. Waxman and Rush to the FCC.
“Affordable phone calls home are a proven way to reduce the high social and economic costs of incarceration and recidivism. Inmates’ families have been waiting for relief for almost a decade. It’s time for the FCC to take action,” said Rep. Waxman.
Last week, the Prison Policy Initiative mobilized the corporate accountability organization Sum Of Us to organize their members to sign a petition to the FCC.
“Tens of thousands of their members have already signed the petition, and we’ll be delivering the petitions to the FCC soon,” says Wagner
WHAT TO DO?
Take action with Sum Of Us.
Take action with Thousand Kites.
Read more at the Prison Policy Initiative.
Source: Take Part
PRISON MAP
Prison Map is the most complete visualisation project of America’s prison system that I’ve come across. No surprise that it takes the form of satellite imagery and no surprise it was made with the aid of computer code.
Prison Map is the work of Josh Begley, an Interactive Telecommunications graduate student at NYU. He developed the project as part of Jer Thorp‘s Data Representation class.
The title is a little misleading. “It’s not a map,” says Begley, “It’s a snapshot of the earth’s surface, taken at various points throughout the United States. It begins from the premise that mapping the contours of the carceral state is important.”
A premise I can agree with. In my meagre attempts to comprehend the size and impact of contemporary prison construction, I’ve compared state-commissioned aerial photography with the fine art photography of David Maisel. I’ve also admired the Incarceration Nation project by non-profit Thousand Kites using roving Google Earth imagery to describe penal architectures (although the manual labour behind Incarceration Nation always seemed to big and ultimately wasteful; an irony not lost for a project commenting on the wasteful prison industrial complex.)
Begley had made cursory use of the CDCr’s own aerial photographs for his earlier Prison Count, but that project is shallow by comparison to Prison Map.
SIGNIFICANCE
Prison Map both orders and exposes the sprawl of prisons in our society; Begley was motivated by the frustration that words and figures often fall short. Again, it is a premise I’m very sympathetic to. What difference does it make if the figure you use to describe an invisible problem has an extra zero or not?
“When discussing the idea of mass incarceration, we often trot out numbers and dates and charts to explain the growth of imprisonment as both a historical phenomenon and a present-day reality,” says Begley. “But what does the geography of incarceration in the US actually look like? What does it mean to have 5,000 or 6,000 people locked up in the same place? What do these carceral spaces look like? How do they transform (or get transformed by) the landscape around them?”
TOOLS
Begley used the Correctional Facility Locator, a project of the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI)*, as his primary tool. The Correctional Facility Locator database includes the hard-to-locate latitude and longitude coordinates of every carceral facility counted in the 2010 US census.
Begley notes that the Correctional Facility Locator is the first and only database to include state and federal prisons alongside local jails, detention centers, and privately-run facilities. 4,916 facilities in total. It is the only such database of which I’m aware.
Using the Google Maps API and the Static Maps service, Begley and Thorp wrote a simple processing sketch that grabbed image tiles at specified latitudes and longitudes, saving each as a JPEG file. The processing sketch cycled through 4,916 facilities.
Some of the captured images were more confusing than instructive – and dealing with nearly five thousand images proved unwieldy – so Begley selected “only” 700 (14%) of the best photos. If you want to see Begley’s entire data set, you can do so here.
USES
The question that this project raises is what can be done with this visualised data to effect change and propel social justice? Artist Paul Rucker used maps created by Rose Heyer (also of PPI) to compose Proliferation. Begley has culled the images; what digital collaging, comparative analysis and collaborations can be constructed with the images?
Perhaps information is more important than images? Toward the end of his TEDxVancouver Talk, Jer Thorp (Begley’s NYU professor) talks about how data represents real life events and their associated emotions. Movements mapped to, fro and between prisons may begin to describe the mass movement within mass incarceration. Specifically dealing with New York State, the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University investigated these types of visualisation with its Million Dollar Blocks project.
An App about the forced migrations within the prison industrial complex is waiting to be built. The first stumbling block is access to data. The prison system is not renowned for being open with its information.
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If you’d like to know more, Josh Begley can be contacted at josh.begley[at]nyu.edu
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Thanks to Sameer Padania for the tip.
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Prison Photography 