06 Jun Prison Map

NYU grad student Josh Begley wrote a simple program (technically, a processing script) to capture a Google Earth arial image of every prison in the United States, then used the images as tiles to build a huge mosaic he calls Prison Map. The complete image is so vast, and takes so long to load as a website, Begley’s main site defaults to a 700-prison subset of the best images.

The United States is the prison capital of the world. This is not news to most people. 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. But what does the geography of incarceration in the US actually look like? Prison Map is my attempt to answer that question.

Clicking on an individual tile brings up a higher resolution copy of the image. More on the project here. Anyone want to do Canada’s prisons?

H/T: Nathan Yau