The Justice Mapping Center is an innovative organization that uses the computer mapping system called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to effect policy change in the criminal justice system. Their work is wide-ranging, but their projects include making maps of where incarcerated people go when they get out of prison, overlays between criminal justice populations and other populations who receive government assistance, and the concentration of social welfare institutions.What I think is so interesting about this group is that they use mapping software to effectively demonstrate the connections between under-resourced communities and cycles of crime and imprisonment. There is an article in the New York Times today which describes how the center was able to use their work to help get government funding into neighborhoods in Houston where many people from prison return to.
The Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University has worked with the Justice Mapping Center to create visual displays of information related to prisoner reentry. What can be so compelling about projects like this is that they take complex data and make it legible — they work as journal article or a research monograph might. They also, as the Columbia researcher suggest, help us look more holistically at the consequences of crime on communities beyond the public safety paradigm (This is from the report ‘Architecture and Justice’:
This work relates to the principles espoused by Edward Tufte, a graphic designer keen on encouraging the elegant display of complex information. He is interested in moving away from our reliance on Powerpoint and other static forms of communicating information. I like this little poster he created about the cognitive style of Powerpoint:
When thinking about influencing policy, I think it is important to heed Tufte’s warning. The communication of information can lead to rigid thinking. This was demonstrated well by the neighborhood mapping that took place in New York during the zero tolerance era, in which the NYPD concentrated their policing efforts based on mapping technologies, but leaving out, as shown by the Columbia project, broader considerations about the longer term impacts on communities who were impacted by incarceration as well as crime.
