The Geometry of Incarceration

The Geometry of IncarcerationR.

Michael GosselinBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingMar 3How The Racial Dot Map helped me find every prison in the state of New York“Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows — only hard with luminous edges — and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.

” -Edward Abbey, Flatland (1884)In July of 2013, Dustin Cable, from the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia, gave the world an invaluable document: The Racial Dot Map.

The map displays 308,745,538 dots, one for each person residing in the United States at the location they were counted during the 2010 Census.

Each dot is color-coded by the individual’s race and ethnicity: Whites are coded as blue; African-Americans, green; Asians, red; Hispanics, orange; and all other racial categories are coded as brown.

When I discovered the Map, I zoomed straight in on Rochester, NY, where I live.

The racial topography is clear.

Natural and man made boundaries — The Inner Loop, Route 490, the Genesee River — carve up the surface like an X-Acto knife:All map images Copyright, 2013, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (Dustin A.

Cable, creator)The purplish bulb to the southwest, pushing out into the Genesee, is the University of Rochester.

Across the river to the west is the 19th Ward, almost solid green, with a tip of blue and red marking the location of Corn Hill.

Green and orange dots continue in a clockwise arc toward the northeast, in an area known as The Crescent.

In a 2003 article in the New York Times, Michelle York reported that “[t]he crescent is home to 27 percent of the city’s residents and 80 percent of the city’s homicides.

” According to York,The reasons behind the burst of violence…include the lagging upstate economy, a steady migration of residents to the suburbs and a growing number of abandoned houses prone to become centers of drug sales and use.

Rochester also has a school system that performs poorly.

Only a quarter of high school freshmen last four years and graduate.

Some 93 percent of school-age children live in poverty…Just south of The Crescent, past the sharp boundary of East Main St.

, is a wedge of deep blue: the upscale East End.

According to its web site, “The East End…is Upstate NY’s premier destination for fine dining, nightlife, entertainment and the arts, doing business and living an urban lifestyle.

” From there, blue dots scatter toward the east and south, dissolving into seemingly thin air.

I zoomed out from the Rochester map and started scrolling to the left, to visit Buffalo, when a tiny, dark blip caught my attention.

At first, I took it for another scratch on the screen of my antediluvian MacBook, except it was moving.

So I zoomed in further:The blue sprinkles at the top show the village of Attica.

The large, densely-packed rectangle is Attica Correctional Facility.

The smaller rectangle is Wyoming.

At this point, it became like a game, as I zoomed out and scrolled freely around the state.

Whenever I encountered a dark spot, I zoomed back in for a closer look.

It was always a tightly packed polygon, situated near fields of scattered blue.

Here’s Five Points:And Gowanda:And Albion, with its prison for women:And so on.

Try it with your own state.

For best results, click on “Remove Map Labels” first, to negate the Stroop Effect and let these colorful shapes speak their own truths.

Here’s one of them: Things have not improved in The Crescent since Hill wrote her article.

Paul Jargowsky, in a 2015 report for the Century Foundation, titled “Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy,” found that Rochester has the 4th highest Black concentration of poverty in the United States, jumping from 34.

2% in 2000, to 51.

5% in 2009–2013.

Buffalo came in at #6.

Syracuse was #1.

What does this mean for the cycle of incarceration?.In the words of Tony Gaskew, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Pittsburgh,The road to redemption for an incarcerated Black male returning to his community is paved with temptations, disappointments, and failures.

When he goes home, unemployment will still be high.

Our educational system will still be broken.

He will still have the greatest opportunity to be victimized by a person within his own community of similar race or ethnic background.

There will still be more liquor stores than schools in his neighborhood.

(NEW DIRECTIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES, no.

170, Summer 2015.

)James Baldwin captured this process in his short story, “Sonny’s Blues” — which is itself almost 60 years old — during a cab ride shared between the narrator and his brother, who had just been released from prison:“So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood.

These streets hadn’t changed…”“These neighborhoods,” says Jargowsky, “are not the value-free outcome of the impartial workings of the housing market.

Rather, in large measure, they are the inevitable and predictable consequences of deliberate policy choices.

” The roots of the problem are clear — hard with luminous edges.

Can the same be said of our resolve to fix it?For more images highlighting the geometry of incarceration, see prisonmap.

com, by Josh Begley.

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