terça-feira, 29 de julho de 2008

Mapa geopolítico do cárcere



Na contramão dos mapas de crime que surgem na rede incitando o exercício de uma vigilância distribuída e participativa sobre a cidade e seus habitantes, o projeto Million Dollar Blocks mapeia o enorme investimento financeiro do estado americano em prisões, bem como o fluxo "city-prison-city-prison" em cinco cidades americanas. Esse mapa geopolítico do cárcere pretende tornar visível as sombrias estatísticas da justiça criminal, bem como a escolha do estado em investir em prisões o que poderia estar orientado para a "infraestrutura cívica, como educação, saúde, habitação e família". Trechos da descrição do projeto:

" The United States currently has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. When these people are released and reenter their communities, roughly forty percent do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated.
Using rarely accessible data from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city-prison-city-prison migration flow for five of the nation’s cities. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today.
The project continues to present ongoing work on criminal justice statistics to make visible the geography of incarceration and return in New York, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Wichita, prompting new ways of understanding the spatial dimension of an area of public policy with profound implications for American cities."

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