8 ms·

Prison Map

90 points by MichaelAO 12y ago

chii 12y ago
i wonder if it actually costs more to imprison those inmates than the value destruction they would've caused had they not been imprisoned. $70 billion is a massive amount that is just going down the drain, for next to no societal value. thats approx $350 per person per year!
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  $70bil/2.2mil works out @ $31,818 There is societal value to housing criminals that pose a danger to society. I'm more than happy to have psychopaths locked away from my life. The question is how many of these people are actually dangerous, or would remain dangerous given some basic education and/or life support.
  - sandworm 12y ago
    The vast majority of psychopaths are not criminals. A total disregard for the thoughts of others, a lack of empathy, can be an advantage. Bankers, lawyers, politicians, even some doctors display aspects of psychopathy. When you are in hospital after a bad car crash you don't want to be treated by a Doctor who 'feels your pain'. You want that cold and calculating mind to take decisions based on facts rather than emotion. Most psychopaths find their niches.
  - lloeki 12y ago
    > The question is how many of these people are actually dangerous, or would remain dangerous given some basic education and/or life support. "He who opens a school door, closes a prison." - Victor Hugo
Gustomaximus 12y ago
Off topic, does anyone know how the prison contracts tend to be priced? I wonder if any prisons have bonus payments for inmates who don't re-offend? It seems a prison is better off keeping their population criminalised to drum up maximum return business. Whereas it would seem logical for authorities to have payment set where housing prisoners a loss leader to producing functional citizens, at which the real bonus payments kick in. I think if the payment system shifted to this we would see better prison conditions improve fast and much more education focus... or is something like this in play already?
tzs 12y ago
> And there are more jails and prisons than colleges and universities in this country This seems reasonable to me, considering how people end up in jail and college, respectively. College is something people generally go to voluntarily, with the consent of their family, and generally at a time when they are transitioning from living with the parents as a dependent to living as an independent adult. They are looking forward to their adult life, and putting childhood behind. They often seek a college away from their home region, as part of asserting their independence. Most people who end up in jail didn't get there voluntarily. Sure, we could reduce the number of jails significantly. The majority of them are fairly small local facilities, serving a city or a county, and their population often is mostly people serving less than a year, or people who have not even been convicted yet but either could not make bail or are being held on charges too serious to allow bail. It would probably be more efficient to close all of those and move those prisoners to a few big facilities. I don't think most of the affected prisoners would like that, though. It would make it a lot harder for their families to visit them. It would make it harder for those awaiting trial to meet with their lawyers. I think it would be best if we had enough jails and prisons to allow most prisoners to be kept somewhere within a couple hours travel from their family, so that their spouse, kids, and friends can reasonably visit them every visiting day.
- beloch 12y ago
  To put things in perspective, the U.S. has the second largest incarceration rate in the world, behind only Seychelles, which is tiny enough to be statistically aberrant. Despite the many similarities of Canada to the U.S., Canada has just one sixth the number of people in prison. With this statistic in mind you'd think the lawless streets of Canada would be far more violent and dangerous than those of the U.S., but exactly the opposite is the case. Something strange is going on in the U.S.. The best theory I've seen put forth is that prison's are a booming for-profit industry in the U.S., and profits breed corruption. Consider the "Kids for Cash" scandal from a few years back in Pennsylvania. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal To sum up, a judge was found guilty of accepting bribes to sentence minors to a specific jail for minor offenses. The child incarceration rate was apparently not naturally high enough to support the prison, so steps were taken. If a top to bottom examination of the U.S.'s justice system were made, there is little doubt that prison time is handed out more liberally than is warranted to deter and rehabilitate criminals. So, the fact that there are more prisons than colleges in your nation should seem alarming rather "reasonable". I'm Canadian, and we're starting to see american style prisons, longer sentences, and a correspondingly higher incarceration rate with higher security prisons and, worst of all, proportionally more prisoners in solitary confinement. Our politicians make hay on being "tough on crime" even when all evidence suggests longer sentences provide no deterrent to first-time or repeat offenders. There is increasing evidence that solitary confinement, besides being inhumane, acts against the interests of rehabilitation. Canada, and many other nations as well, need to observe what's gone wrong in the U.S.'s justice system so that they can avoid making the same mistakes. In Canada, there were two private correctional facilities, but both have reverted to government control. This is good, but private prison companies continue to lobby the government for contract business. They must be denied. Private enterprises may be more efficient at many things, but the justice system must prioritize results and a lack of corruption above all else.
MichaelAO 12y ago
Probably should have posted this link instead: http://prisonmap.com/ http://prisonmap.com/ Edit: Pretty cool why/how he got satellite imagery of all 4,916 facilities (http://prisonmap.com/about http://prisonmap.com/about)
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks, we changed the url to that from http://www.wired.com/2015/01/josh-begley-prison-map/ http://www.wired.com/2015/01/josh-begley-prison-map/. It was posted 4 times previously to HN, including twice 3 years ago, but has not had significant attention.
  - t0dd 12y ago
    Yeah, I posted this a couple months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565019), and it got very little traction. Glad it is this time around!
1971genocide 12y ago
What I find ironic is the symmetry, both the richest Americans and poorest live in "gated communities".
- Retra 12y ago
  Not a new idea: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html
sandworm 12y ago
Prisons are the symptom, not the disease. They are the visible end result of social policies. Those policies are dictated by an elected government. It far easier to criticize prisons than to address the beliefs that create them. America lacks any proper mental health care for the poor, a political decision. America lacks proper treatment programs for drug addiction, a political decision. America prides itself on being "tough" on crime, a political decision. America is swamped in guns, turning many minor crimes into accidentally lethal encounters --> political. The prison problem starts and ends with US politics.
- adityasankar 12y ago
  Not a US citizen, but I was under the impression that the "War on Drugs" was another major contributor to incarceration. Intent to sell (bad) and indeed even possession (harmless?) of marijuana could land you in jail, correct?
  - sandworm 12y ago
    Yes. Drugs, at least the illegal ones, can/do/will land you in jail and eventually prison. Marijuana possession alone is enough, depending on how much you have and/or how it is packages (ie "with intent to distribute"). This depends on which state you are in, whether you are caught while crossing a state line (air travel) and the colour of the uniform on the officer who catches you (federal v. state). Some states have decriminalized possession but the US fed has not. As a general rule, US "jails" house people awaiting trial and/or serving short sentences. "Prisons" house people with more than one year to serve. Prisons are generally much nicer places than jails. (I went to a US law school, spent lots of time dealing with low-level offenders all of which were drug related. It's a horrible horrible system.)
    - Vespasian 12y ago
      Thank you for that last part. As a non US citizen i never knew there even was a difference between jails and prisons. Interesting :)
Renaud 12y ago
I am always utterly amazed by the level of incarceration in the US. Here is one of the 'top' country in the world, whatever metric you use for stable western democracies, and yet, a huge proportion of its population is spending or has spent some time incarcerated. Whatever explanation is given, it seems unfathomable that a democratic country could end-up with higher incarceration rates than the worse dictatorships.
- rogerbinns 12y ago
  It isn't only the incarceration rates that are problematic. For example the police can legally steal stuff/money - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks "civil forfeiture". Being on the poorer end of society leads to more adverse outcomes in the "justice" system. For people who have been incarcerated, getting back into society is hard since the system is not about rehabilitation. Recidivism rates are higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism Or on a more personal note, how about a 79 year old man with the early stages of alzheimers and dementia put in prison, isolated, and denied a phone call, access to lawyers or even being able to let anyone know this has happened for 3 months? Innocent until proven guilty doesn't even apply, let alone basic justice.
  - Renaud 12y ago
    Definitely sounds like a country where I'd rather not live. A prison system built for maximizing profit can only fall into corruption. Rehabilitation, while being of the utmost importance to society, goes completely against the objectives of a business who would thrive on offenders that keep getting jailed. What a perversion.
    - rogerbinns 12y ago
      Note that it is more than just maximizing profit. Prison guard unions are politically strong and they too campaign for more prisons and more occupants, because it means more jobs and union members.
sshanky 12y ago
A lot of those images appear to be airports. Maybe the algorithm mistakenly identifies them?
- valevk 12y ago
  I think those are prisons which are build next to abandoned airports. Airports are mostly build outside of populated areas (good for prisons), and there is an airport where a plane could land and bring prisoners. Although, I don't know whether planes are allowed to land on abandoned airports.
sandstrom 12y ago
Nice website! An improvement to the website would be a CDN (faster loading of images) and using 'infinite scroll' to load all (~4000) images. One can use a piece of js to only load images in the viewport. Could also add a small placeholder text shown (instead of black) before the image is loaded. E.g. the coordinates, or county/state, or the size of the facility in square meters (or yards or whatever).
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  Please stop encouraging people to use infinite scroll, it is a scourge to be eradicated. In any case you think infinite scroll would be useful, what you really want is a link at the bottom of the page that says "elements per page: 25 | 50 | 250 | unlimited". Infinite scroll makes it painful to reach the end of a large list on a machine with low memory. It deprives the user of the ability to record your place in the list if you want to come back tomorrow (or switch to another device or restart your computer etc. etc.), or send a link to someone else. It breaks the web.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    It deprives the user of the ability to record your place in the list if you want to come back tomorrow (or switch to another device or restart your computer etc. etc.), or send a link to someone else. Technically, you can use history.pushState & replaceState to automatically update the URL to the current position without having to reload the page. Demo: http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
1971genocide 12y ago
I am not sure how many HNers have watched The Interview. But at point Kim John Un points that that America has an higher incarnation rate than North Korea - They brushed it off in the movie But I still think about it. How can the world's proudest democracy answer the simple question that Kim John Un poised ?
- bmmayer1 12y ago
  Well to start with, it's a very misleading comparison. Every single person in North Korea is in prison. Just because most of them are not behind bars doesn't mean they are not prisoners. By contrast, Americans only (largely, overwhelmingly) end up in prison if they break laws (false convictions are statistically rare). We have too many laws, to be sure, and that is a problem we need to address, but no one would seriously believe that America's standard for imprisonment is lower than North Korea's.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    > By contrast, Americans only (largely, overwhelmingly) end up in prison if they break laws How is that a productive distinction when the problem (as you admit) is that there are too many laws which are too vague and too broad? "You only go to prison if you break the law" is useless consolation if it's not possible for generally honest people to live their lives without breaking the law. It causes enforcement to be at the whim of the government. You're already a criminal, so whether you go to jail is based on whether they decide to prosecute you. Which is clearly not entirely based on whether you committed a crime. > false convictions are statistically rare How do you even propose to measure that?
  - 1971genocide 12y ago
    Of course, USA is far better in every way than North Korea ! I am not confused about that part. The reason why this question is important is because We generally do not recognize North Korea's sovereignty. We have this notion that we are orders of magnitude more advanced then them. What I think Kim-John-Un means is we cannot pass value judgement on him. Yes he kills a lot of people but we can judge him for his actions at killing a lot of people. We can even get rid of him because of that. But we cannot make the argument that our way and implementation of governance is way superior to his.
spork1 12y ago
sweet, some inspiration for my prison architect!
Jugurtha 12y ago
Are you sure these are not prisons worldwide? I don't know, but that seems like a lot of prisons to be just in the U.S.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  Yeah, sadly, it's actually only 14% of them (read the 'about' page).
jnbiche 12y ago
This is actually only 14% of the total US prisons. Read the 'about' page, and it explains the methodology, where the data comes from, as well as the percentage of prisons depicted.
percept 12y ago
I thought this would be a color-coded map of the U.S., and wonder if the creator has considered adding that...
UserRights 12y ago
You should take it one step further! Add some interesting information to each prison, especially if it is one lead by a private company, and, most important, the actual profit. Then in the next step add some charts, user login, connect to a payment service and make it a really cool prison investment exchange! Maybe you could issue some prisoncoins based on the profit numbers. Of course do not forget to publish your own javascript framework that evolved while building it... However cynical this can get, I doubt that most people will understand that the US model of 'society' is deeply br0ken. To add something useful: a collaborative data collection of human right violations like e.g torture might be a good tool for triggering a positive change. I am sure there are many other issues that could be attached to the basic gis data collection [1] Please crowdfund this, so it can grow. [1] http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/ http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/
- slouch 12y ago
  I know you're joking, but there are prison start ups, and JPay is a very successful one: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-bankers-cash-captive-customers http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-banke...
runemadsen 12y ago
To those of you interested in prison architecture and its effect on society, the architecture magazine Clog has made a great publication on it. http://www.clog-online.com/shop/clog-prisons/ http://www.clog-online.com/shop/clog-prisons/
bambax 12y ago
> To create Prison Map, Begley coded a script that plugged the known coordinates of prisons and jails nationwide into the Google Maps API. When he ran the script, it snapped a photo of every county jail, state prison (...) I'm familiar with the GMaps API, but not with how one would do that? Is this run inside a browser/PhantomJS? Does anyone has an idea how to do this as simply and "cleanly" as possible?

90 points by MichaelAO 12y ago

chii 12y ago

i wonder if it actually costs more to imprison those inmates than the value destruction they would've caused had they not been imprisoned. $70 billion is a massive amount that is just going down the drain, for next to no societal value. thats approx $350 per person per year!

Gustomaximus 12y ago
$70bil/2.2mil works out @ $31,818 There is societal value to housing criminals that pose a danger to society. I'm more than happy to have psychopaths locked away from my life. The question is how many of these people are actually dangerous, or would remain dangerous given some basic education and/or life support.
- sandworm 12y ago
  The vast majority of psychopaths are not criminals. A total disregard for the thoughts of others, a lack of empathy, can be an advantage. Bankers, lawyers, politicians, even some doctors display aspects of psychopathy. When you are in hospital after a bad car crash you don't want to be treated by a Doctor who 'feels your pain'. You want that cold and calculating mind to take decisions based on facts rather than emotion. Most psychopaths find their niches.
- lloeki 12y ago
  > The question is how many of these people are actually dangerous, or would remain dangerous given some basic education and/or life support. "He who opens a school door, closes a prison." - Victor Hugo

Gustomaximus 12y ago

Off topic, does anyone know how the prison contracts tend to be priced? I wonder if any prisons have bonus payments for inmates who don't re-offend? It seems a prison is better off keeping their population criminalised to drum up maximum return business. Whereas it would seem logical for authorities to have payment set where housing prisoners a loss leader to producing functional citizens, at which the real bonus payments kick in. I think if the payment system shifted to this we would see better prison conditions improve fast and much more education focus... or is something like this in play already?

tzs 12y ago

> And there are more jails and prisons than colleges and universities in this country This seems reasonable to me, considering how people end up in jail and college, respectively. College is something people generally go to voluntarily, with the consent of their family, and generally at a time when they are transitioning from living with the parents as a dependent to living as an independent adult. They are looking forward to their adult life, and putting childhood behind. They often seek a college away from their home region, as part of asserting their independence. Most people who end up in jail didn't get there voluntarily. Sure, we could reduce the number of jails significantly. The majority of them are fairly small local facilities, serving a city or a county, and their population often is mostly people serving less than a year, or people who have not even been convicted yet but either could not make bail or are being held on charges too serious to allow bail. It would probably be more efficient to close all of those and move those prisoners to a few big facilities. I don't think most of the affected prisoners would like that, though. It would make it a lot harder for their families to visit them. It would make it harder for those awaiting trial to meet with their lawyers. I think it would be best if we had enough jails and prisons to allow most prisoners to be kept somewhere within a couple hours travel from their family, so that their spouse, kids, and friends can reasonably visit them every visiting day.

beloch 12y ago
To put things in perspective, the U.S. has the second largest incarceration rate in the world, behind only Seychelles, which is tiny enough to be statistically aberrant. Despite the many similarities of Canada to the U.S., Canada has just one sixth the number of people in prison. With this statistic in mind you'd think the lawless streets of Canada would be far more violent and dangerous than those of the U.S., but exactly the opposite is the case. Something strange is going on in the U.S.. The best theory I've seen put forth is that prison's are a booming for-profit industry in the U.S., and profits breed corruption. Consider the "Kids for Cash" scandal from a few years back in Pennsylvania. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal To sum up, a judge was found guilty of accepting bribes to sentence minors to a specific jail for minor offenses. The child incarceration rate was apparently not naturally high enough to support the prison, so steps were taken. If a top to bottom examination of the U.S.'s justice system were made, there is little doubt that prison time is handed out more liberally than is warranted to deter and rehabilitate criminals. So, the fact that there are more prisons than colleges in your nation should seem alarming rather "reasonable". I'm Canadian, and we're starting to see american style prisons, longer sentences, and a correspondingly higher incarceration rate with higher security prisons and, worst of all, proportionally more prisoners in solitary confinement. Our politicians make hay on being "tough on crime" even when all evidence suggests longer sentences provide no deterrent to first-time or repeat offenders. There is increasing evidence that solitary confinement, besides being inhumane, acts against the interests of rehabilitation. Canada, and many other nations as well, need to observe what's gone wrong in the U.S.'s justice system so that they can avoid making the same mistakes. In Canada, there were two private correctional facilities, but both have reverted to government control. This is good, but private prison companies continue to lobby the government for contract business. They must be denied. Private enterprises may be more efficient at many things, but the justice system must prioritize results and a lack of corruption above all else.

MichaelAO 12y ago

Probably should have posted this link instead: http://prisonmap.com/ http://prisonmap.com/ Edit: Pretty cool why/how he got satellite imagery of all 4,916 facilities (http://prisonmap.com/about http://prisonmap.com/about)

dang 12y ago
Thanks, we changed the url to that from http://www.wired.com/2015/01/josh-begley-prison-map/ http://www.wired.com/2015/01/josh-begley-prison-map/. It was posted 4 times previously to HN, including twice 3 years ago, but has not had significant attention.
- t0dd 12y ago
  Yeah, I posted this a couple months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565019), and it got very little traction. Glad it is this time around!

1971genocide 12y ago

What I find ironic is the symmetry, both the richest Americans and poorest live in "gated communities".

Retra 12y ago
Not a new idea: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html

sandworm 12y ago

Prisons are the symptom, not the disease. They are the visible end result of social policies. Those policies are dictated by an elected government. It far easier to criticize prisons than to address the beliefs that create them. America lacks any proper mental health care for the poor, a political decision. America lacks proper treatment programs for drug addiction, a political decision. America prides itself on being "tough" on crime, a political decision. America is swamped in guns, turning many minor crimes into accidentally lethal encounters --> political. The prison problem starts and ends with US politics.

adityasankar 12y ago
Not a US citizen, but I was under the impression that the "War on Drugs" was another major contributor to incarceration. Intent to sell (bad) and indeed even possession (harmless?) of marijuana could land you in jail, correct?
- sandworm 12y ago
  Yes. Drugs, at least the illegal ones, can/do/will land you in jail and eventually prison. Marijuana possession alone is enough, depending on how much you have and/or how it is packages (ie "with intent to distribute"). This depends on which state you are in, whether you are caught while crossing a state line (air travel) and the colour of the uniform on the officer who catches you (federal v. state). Some states have decriminalized possession but the US fed has not. As a general rule, US "jails" house people awaiting trial and/or serving short sentences. "Prisons" house people with more than one year to serve. Prisons are generally much nicer places than jails. (I went to a US law school, spent lots of time dealing with low-level offenders all of which were drug related. It's a horrible horrible system.)
  - Vespasian 12y ago
    Thank you for that last part. As a non US citizen i never knew there even was a difference between jails and prisons. Interesting :)

Renaud 12y ago

I am always utterly amazed by the level of incarceration in the US. Here is one of the 'top' country in the world, whatever metric you use for stable western democracies, and yet, a huge proportion of its population is spending or has spent some time incarcerated. Whatever explanation is given, it seems unfathomable that a democratic country could end-up with higher incarceration rates than the worse dictatorships.

rogerbinns 12y ago
It isn't only the incarceration rates that are problematic. For example the police can legally steal stuff/money - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks "civil forfeiture". Being on the poorer end of society leads to more adverse outcomes in the "justice" system. For people who have been incarcerated, getting back into society is hard since the system is not about rehabilitation. Recidivism rates are higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism Or on a more personal note, how about a 79 year old man with the early stages of alzheimers and dementia put in prison, isolated, and denied a phone call, access to lawyers or even being able to let anyone know this has happened for 3 months? Innocent until proven guilty doesn't even apply, let alone basic justice.
- Renaud 12y ago
  Definitely sounds like a country where I'd rather not live. A prison system built for maximizing profit can only fall into corruption. Rehabilitation, while being of the utmost importance to society, goes completely against the objectives of a business who would thrive on offenders that keep getting jailed. What a perversion.
  - rogerbinns 12y ago
    Note that it is more than just maximizing profit. Prison guard unions are politically strong and they too campaign for more prisons and more occupants, because it means more jobs and union members.

sshanky 12y ago

A lot of those images appear to be airports. Maybe the algorithm mistakenly identifies them?

valevk 12y ago
I think those are prisons which are build next to abandoned airports. Airports are mostly build outside of populated areas (good for prisons), and there is an airport where a plane could land and bring prisoners. Although, I don't know whether planes are allowed to land on abandoned airports.

sandstrom 12y ago

Nice website! An improvement to the website would be a CDN (faster loading of images) and using 'infinite scroll' to load all (~4000) images. One can use a piece of js to only load images in the viewport. Could also add a small placeholder text shown (instead of black) before the image is loaded. E.g. the coordinates, or county/state, or the size of the facility in square meters (or yards or whatever).

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
Please stop encouraging people to use infinite scroll, it is a scourge to be eradicated. In any case you think infinite scroll would be useful, what you really want is a link at the bottom of the page that says "elements per page: 25 | 50 | 250 | unlimited". Infinite scroll makes it painful to reach the end of a large list on a machine with low memory. It deprives the user of the ability to record your place in the list if you want to come back tomorrow (or switch to another device or restart your computer etc. etc.), or send a link to someone else. It breaks the web.
- icebraining 12y ago
  It deprives the user of the ability to record your place in the list if you want to come back tomorrow (or switch to another device or restart your computer etc. etc.), or send a link to someone else. Technically, you can use history.pushState & replaceState to automatically update the URL to the current position without having to reload the page. Demo: http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

1971genocide 12y ago

I am not sure how many HNers have watched The Interview. But at point Kim John Un points that that America has an higher incarnation rate than North Korea - They brushed it off in the movie But I still think about it. How can the world's proudest democracy answer the simple question that Kim John Un poised ?

bmmayer1 12y ago
Well to start with, it's a very misleading comparison. Every single person in North Korea is in prison. Just because most of them are not behind bars doesn't mean they are not prisoners. By contrast, Americans only (largely, overwhelmingly) end up in prison if they break laws (false convictions are statistically rare). We have too many laws, to be sure, and that is a problem we need to address, but no one would seriously believe that America's standard for imprisonment is lower than North Korea's.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > By contrast, Americans only (largely, overwhelmingly) end up in prison if they break laws How is that a productive distinction when the problem (as you admit) is that there are too many laws which are too vague and too broad? "You only go to prison if you break the law" is useless consolation if it's not possible for generally honest people to live their lives without breaking the law. It causes enforcement to be at the whim of the government. You're already a criminal, so whether you go to jail is based on whether they decide to prosecute you. Which is clearly not entirely based on whether you committed a crime. > false convictions are statistically rare How do you even propose to measure that?
- 1971genocide 12y ago
  Of course, USA is far better in every way than North Korea ! I am not confused about that part. The reason why this question is important is because We generally do not recognize North Korea's sovereignty. We have this notion that we are orders of magnitude more advanced then them. What I think Kim-John-Un means is we cannot pass value judgement on him. Yes he kills a lot of people but we can judge him for his actions at killing a lot of people. We can even get rid of him because of that. But we cannot make the argument that our way and implementation of governance is way superior to his.

spork1 12y ago

sweet, some inspiration for my prison architect!

Jugurtha 12y ago

Are you sure these are not prisons worldwide? I don't know, but that seems like a lot of prisons to be just in the U.S.

jnbiche 12y ago
Yeah, sadly, it's actually only 14% of them (read the 'about' page).

jnbiche 12y ago

This is actually only 14% of the total US prisons. Read the 'about' page, and it explains the methodology, where the data comes from, as well as the percentage of prisons depicted.

percept 12y ago

I thought this would be a color-coded map of the U.S., and wonder if the creator has considered adding that...

UserRights 12y ago

You should take it one step further! Add some interesting information to each prison, especially if it is one lead by a private company, and, most important, the actual profit. Then in the next step add some charts, user login, connect to a payment service and make it a really cool prison investment exchange! Maybe you could issue some prisoncoins based on the profit numbers. Of course do not forget to publish your own javascript framework that evolved while building it... However cynical this can get, I doubt that most people will understand that the US model of 'society' is deeply br0ken. To add something useful: a collaborative data collection of human right violations like e.g torture might be a good tool for triggering a positive change. I am sure there are many other issues that could be attached to the basic gis data collection [1] Please crowdfund this, so it can grow. [1] http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/ http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/

slouch 12y ago
I know you're joking, but there are prison start ups, and JPay is a very successful one: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-bankers-cash-captive-customers http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-banke...

runemadsen 12y ago

To those of you interested in prison architecture and its effect on society, the architecture magazine Clog has made a great publication on it. http://www.clog-online.com/shop/clog-prisons/ http://www.clog-online.com/shop/clog-prisons/

bambax 12y ago

> To create Prison Map, Begley coded a script that plugged the known coordinates of prisons and jails nationwide into the Google Maps API. When he ran the script, it snapped a photo of every county jail, state prison (...) I'm familiar with the GMaps API, but not with how one would do that? Is this run inside a browser/PhantomJS? Does anyone has an idea how to do this as simply and "cleanly" as possible?