MILLION-DOLLAR BLOCKS

The Remeeder Houses make up one of the poorest blocks in Brooklyn.
Six-story buildings rise from the rectangular patch of land between
Sutter and Blake avenues, and between Georgia and Alabama avenues in
East New York. More than 50 percent of the project's residents live
below the poverty line. Unemploymentis rampant. Run-down, overcrowded
apartments are the norm. By another measure, though, this block is one
of the priciest in the city. Last year, five residents were sent to
state prison, at an annual cost of about $30,000 a person. The total
price tag for their incarceration will exceed $1 million.
Criminal-justice experts have a name for this phenomenon:
"million-dollar blocks." In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks
that fit this category--ones where so many residents were sent to
state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more
than $1 million.

In at least one case, the price tag will actually surpass $5 million.
These blocks are largely concentrated in the poorest pockets of the
borough's poorest neighborhoods, including East New York,
Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville.

In recent years, as the U.S. prison population has soared,
million-dollar blocks have popped up in cities across the country.
Maps of prison spending (like the one on the left) suggest a new way
of looking at this phenomenon, illustrating the oft ignored reality
that most prisoners come from just a handfulof urban neighborhoods.
These maps invite numerous questions: How is the community benefiting
from all the money being spent? And might there be another, better way
to spend those same criminal-justice dollars?

These maps have attracted attention nationwide from state legislators
struggling to balance their budgets. In a few state capitols,
prison-spending maps have begun to influence the dynamics of the
political debate, suggesting new ways to think about crime and
punishment, recidivism and reform. One state, Connecticut, has even
gone so far as to change its spending priorities, taking dollars out
of the prison budget and steering them toward the neighborhoods with
the highest rates of incarceration.

Prison-spending maps highlight the fact that money spent on
million-dollar blocks winds up in another part of the state--far from
the scene of the crime. In New York State, about 60 percent of
prisoners come from New York City, but virtually every prison is
located upstate, in rural towns and villages, places like Attica,
Dannemora, and Malone. As Todd Clear, a professor at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, puts it: "People who live on Park Avenue give a
lot of money to people who live in Auburn, New York, in order to watch
people who live in Brooklyn for a couple of years--and send them back
damaged."

Most likely, nobody would now be mulling over the concept of
million-dollar blocks if not for a 42-year-old Brooklynite named Eric
Cadora. Back in 1998, Cadora was working at a nonprofit agency in
Manhattan called the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment
Services, or CASES. He taught himself mapping software and studied the
various ways mapping was used, including by the New York City Police
Department to identify crime hot spots.

About crime mapping, Cadora says, "People weren't coming at it from a
policy reform perspective--and the whole idea of [prisoner] re-entry
and community wasn't part of the issue. Most of the issue was about
getting tough." Cadora wanted to try a different approach. He decided
to create a new set of maps, which he hoped "would help people
envision solutions rather than just critiques."

With criminal-justice data he obtained from a state agency, he
embarked on his first mapping project: Brooklyn. Colleague Charles
Swartz helped, and together they made a series of maps illustrating
where inmates come from and how much money is spent to imprison them.

"The reasons we did the money maps weren't to say, 'Gee, we spent too
much money on criminal justice,' " Cadora explains. "Because what's
too much? The question was to say, 'Look, you can now think of the
money you're spending on incarceration and criminal justice as a pool
of funds' "--that is, funds that could be spent in a different way. He
adds, "What struck me, looking back at a year's worth of prison
admissions, was that these were the results of a bunch of individual
decisions, but it turns out to amount to enough financial investment
to be thought of as an actual spending policy."

In 1999, Cadora began sharing his maps with criminal-justice agencies
and nonprofit organizations. Word spread. Soon other states were
calling. Five years later, Cadora's maps are well-known in
criminal-justice circles. He now works at the After-Prison Initiative,
a program of the George Soros--funded Open Society Institute, and
demand for his maps continues to grow. By now, he and Swartz have made
maps for agencies in Rhode Island, Florida, Arizona, Connecticut,
Louisiana, Kentucky, and New Jersey.

The money that taxpayers spend on prisons pays for the incarceration
of some very violent people--the sorts of criminals who neighbors are
eager to see go away. These dollars are also used to lock up
individuals who commit nonviolent crimes--possession of a few vials of
crack, for example. Soon these individuals will be released from
prison, and they'll go back to the same neighborhoods. Statistics show
there is a strong likelihood they will be locked up again.

Professor Clear, who has worked closely with Cadora, says the maps
suggest a different sort of solution: "Use some of that money to
improve the places those people came from in the first place, so that
they are not crime-production neighborhoods." This might sound like a
fantasy scenario--and a few years ago, that's all it really was. Just
a radical idea, to which Cadora and a colleague gave a wonkish name:
"justice reinvestment."

But budget shortfalls have a way of encouraging politicians to
re-evaluate even the most popular policies, and many states have
concluded that they simply cannot afford to keep so many people in
prison.

For the most part, states that have shrunk their inmate populations
have then steered the savings into a general fund. One state, however,
has reinvested in the neighborhoods that are home to the bulk of its
prisoners.

Until recently, Connecticut had a $500 million budget deficit and more
prisoners than it could house. State Representative Michael P. Lawlor,
a Democrat from East Haven, joined with fellow legislators in 2003 to
introduce a bill that would scale down the inmate population and
funnel the savings into social programs. To win over their colleagues,
the legislators invited Cadora to present his maps.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," says Lawlor, a former
prosecutor who chairs the Judiciary Committee. "I think Eric is able
to graphically depict the insanity of our current system for
preventing crimes in certain neighborhoods. We're spending all of this
money and not getting very good results. I think when you look at it
the way Eric is able to depict it in those neighborhood graphs, you
can see how crazy this all is."

Connecticut legislators passed the bill this spring. To shrink the
prison population, they adopted several strategies, including reducing
the number of people sent to prison for violating probation rules. And
they steered the savings into services designed to curb recidivism,
including mental-health care and drug treatment. Programs in New
Haven--which has many high-incarceration neighborhoods--will receive
$2.5 million.

"It's a huge precedent, even though it's a small state," says Michael
Jacobson, former commissioner of the New York City Department of
Correction, who worked as a consultant for the Connecticut legislature
and wrote about the experience in his forthcoming book, Downsizing
Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. "It's the first
state that through legislation has simultaneously done a bunch of things
that will intelligently lower its prison population, and then reinvest a
significant portion of that savings in the kind of things that will keep
lowering its prison population. No other state has done anything like
that."

The idea may be starting to catch on. In Louisiana, three state
senators introduced a bill earlier this year that proposed to trim the
prison population, save more than $3 million a year, and then spend
that savings on helping ex-prisoners find jobs. The bill did not pass,
but the idea caught the attention of Governor Kathleen Babineaux
Blanco, a Democrat, whose state has the highest rate of incarceration
in the country. She invited representatives of three foundations,
including Cadora, to a luncheon at the governor's mansion. At the
request of her office, Cadora will be creating many more detailed maps
of Louisiana.

New York's situation is slightly different from those of Louisiana and
Connecticut. While the national prison population continues to rise,
New York's inmate population has actually been dropping, from a high
of 71,538 inmates in December 1999 to fewer than 65,000 today. Without
overcrowded prisons--and without a budget crisis like the one
Connecticut was facing--there isn't the same sense of urgency in the
state legislature.

This past spring, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, a Brooklyn
Democrat, introduced a bill to establish the New York State Justice
Reinvestment Fund, a $10 million pilot program to finance
organizations that assist ex-prisoners. Though the bill has 10
co-sponsors, its prospects of passing in the Republican-controlled
senate are slim. The state assembly included a provision in its
drug-law reform bill this year to commission more prison-spending
maps, but that bill didn't pass the senate either.

A map of million-dollar blocks, with stark concentrations of color,
can quickly convey a sense of how self-defeating many criminal-justice
policies have become--how, for example, spending exorbitant amounts of
money locking people up means there's far less money available for
programs that decrease crime, like education, drug treatment,
mental-health care, and job training. But these maps don't tell the
whole story, since they don't show what happens after inmates are set
free.

New York's state prisons release around 28,000 people a year. Nearly
two-thirds of them return to New York City. They arrive wearing
state-issued clothes--a plain sweatshirt and stiff denim pants--and
they come back to the same streets they left. They bring home all the
memories and lessons of prison life, plus the system's parting gift,
$40. Usually, they discover that the neighborhoods they left behind
have not changed, and that life on the outside can be incredibly
difficult. If the past is any predictor, 40 percent of them will be
back upstate within three years.