
Prison Map - MichaelAO
http://prisonmap.com/
======
sandworm
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
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?

~~~
rhino369
While simple possession could land you in jail, it's very rare for that to
happen. There are 750,000 weed arrests in the US and maybe 500 people are in
jail for simple possession only.

The big way weed gets you to jail is because it's a conviction that breaks
your parole and you get sent back for your previous crime.

~~~
pcthrowaway
Please do some research on this. I guarantee you there are more than 500
people in jail at any given time for possession of weed. At least two out of
roughly 40 people in my pod when I spent a week in jail were there for
possession of marijuana alone.

~~~
rhino369
Simple possession or with intent to distribute?

Or are we talking about awaiting a bail hearing?

~~~
pcthrowaway
When you are arrested in the United States, you are taken to jail. After you
have your bond set, you will be released upon someone posting bail. You stated
that it's very rare for simple possession to land you in jail. There was one
person in jail for having been arrested with weed, and another arrested for
paraphernalia. Both may have received a sentence of time served plus
probation, but that doesn't negate the fact that _lots_ of space in our jails
at any given time is being filled up by people arrested with marijuana.

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

~~~
Retra
Not a new idea:

[http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-
mending.html](http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html)

------
Renaud
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
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
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
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.

------
UserRights
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
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-
banke...](http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-bankers-cash-
captive-customers)

------
tzs
> 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
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.

~~~
discardorama
> 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.

Corruption need not be direct, or directly for profit. The Corrections
Officers' Union in California is a formidable force. They can make sure that
only those "tough on crime(tm)" get elected; and until recently, they were all
for prison expansion, harsher sentencing (remember "three strikes"?), etc.

But, thankfully, recently they seem to have been shown to be defeatable:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/09/california-
prison-g...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/09/california-prison-
guards_n_5961926.html)

------
Gustomaximus
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?

------
bambax
> _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?

------
1971genocide
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
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
> 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?

------
runemadsen
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/)

------
chii
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
$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
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.

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

~~~
valevk
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.

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

------
Jugurtha
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
Yeah, sadly, it's actually only 14% of them (read the 'about' page).

------
spork1
sweet, some inspiration for my prison architect!

------
sandstrom
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
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
_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)

