During 2006, Candy received a fellowship to work with the Spatial Information Design Lab and Professor Laura Kurgan in New Orleans. Working with several community groups in the Seventh Ward, Central City, and Broadmoor neighborhoods, they helped develop community investment projects and research on Million Dollar Blocks, a criminal justice project that highlights urban census blocks where so many residents are in prison that it costs at least $1 million to incarcerate them.

The United States has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate residents of single city blocks. When these people are released and reenter their communities, roughly forty percent are reincarcerated within three years.

Maps of prison spending suggest a new way of looking at this phenomenon and suggest that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of local civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family.These maps invite numerous questions: How is the community benefiting from all the money being spent? And how can these same criminal-justice dollars be spent in better ways?

View more info and a pdf of the final report "Rebuilding Community, Prisoner Reentry and Neighborhood Planning in Post-Katrina New Orleans" here

Credits:
Project Director: Laura Kurgan
Project Coordinator: Steven Caputo, Research Associates: Johnna Cressica Brazier,
Deborah Grossberg Katz.
2006 Fellows: Andrew Colopy, Derek Lindner, Leah Meisterlin, Julia Molloy, Candy Chang.

This work builds upon a two year research project: Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping, a collaboration between the Justice Mapping Center, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the JFA Institute.

Project Team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora (Project Directors), Sarah Williams, David Reinfurt. Invaluable research and thinking was also provided by the students in the GSAPP Advanced Studio, Spring 2007:
Johnna Cressica Brazier, Steven Caputo, Jane Estrada, Laura Lee, Catie Liken, John G. Lloyd, Annemarie Scheel