Resource

The following is a report, written by various human rights and juvenile justice advocacy groups in the USA, addressing the many ways that the juvenile justice system is racially discriminatory.  The report is a response to the omission, by the US Department of State, of any discussion of this impact in their report the UN on the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

CERD final report

Resource of the Day

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.

Resource of the day

I’m trying to figure out how to add resources to my sidebar, so until I do, I’ll add a resource of the day.

Today I’m including a report that was a project of Human Rights Watch and the ACLU Women’s rights project. It is a report on the conditions of confinement for girls held in New York’s youth prisons. It includes many narratives from girls about their experiences of confinement, and addresses the use of restraints in confinement, an increasing problem in England and America, and one that is facing growing opposition in England.

The report can be read here: Custody and Control