In 2006-2007 Candy received a fellowship to work with the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) in New Orleans. Working with community groups and charter schools in the Seventh Ward, Central City, and Broadmoor neighborhoods, as well as SIDL’s directors Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams and fellows Andrew Colopy, Derek Lindner, Leah Meisterlin, and Julia Molloy, they developed Million Dollar Blocks, an SIDL project that uses prison expenditure maps to incite changes in the way money is invested in communities.

These maps plot prisoners and their costs back to their original homes and suggest a new way of looking at community investment and how these same criminal-justice dollars can be spent in better ways. More than 2 million people are in jails and prisons in the U.S., and Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In many places the concentration is so dense that the government spends over a million dollars per year to imprison residents of a single city block. At the same time, communities are continuously struggling to get funding and support for civic services like youth programs, job training, and peer support that would provide more opportunities for residents and prevent a life towards crime. They worked with a justice reinvestment network of local organizations, including Cafe Reconcile, Safe Streets/Strong Communities and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, to help establish local pilot projects for job training, health services, and mentorship programs supported by justice reinvestment funding.

View pdf of report.

New Orleans Credits: Project Director: Laura Kurgan. Project Coordinator: Steven Caputo, Research Associates: Johnna Cressica Brazier, Deborah Grossberg Katz. 2006 Fellows: Candy Chang. Andrew Colopy, Derek Lindner, Leah Meisterlin, Julia Molloy. This work builds upon a two year research project: Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping, a collaboration between the Justice Mapping Center, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the JFA Institute. Project Team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora (Project Directors), Sarah Williams, David Reinfurt. Invaluable research and thinking was also provided by the students in the GSAPP Advanced Studio, Spring 2007: Johnna Cressica Brazier, Steven Caputo, Jane Estrada, Laura Lee, Catie Liken, John G. Lloyd, Annemarie Scheel

Percent persons living in poverty per block group, 2000

Percent adults admitted to prison per block group, 2003

Prison expenditures per block in thousands of dollars, 2007

Justice reinvestment network in Central City, 2007