PROJECTS
The Justice Atlas of Incarceration website provides users with maps and data of imprisonment at the neighborhood level. Learn more...
The Justice Audit is designed to bring criminal justice agencies together to enact coordinated, data-driven policies that maximize public safety, fair administration of justice, and the parsimonious use of jail.
The Justice Reinvestment initiative supports data-driven and place-based community reinvestment that helps communities extract themselves from perpetual administration by crippling and costly last resort government.
The Justice Atlas of Incarceration
Justice Mapping launched the Justice Atlas of Incarceration in 2010. This online, interactive research tool provides users with census-tract level views of the use of incarceration in 25 states; detailing its costs and impact as it concentrates in a few local neighborhoods in cities across the country.
Over the coming year, the Justice Atlas will be updated from data for 2008-2010, to include the years 2011-2017 (which will yield an unprecedented 10-years of individual-level data at the street address level) and expand the Atlas' coverage from the 23 states included in the inaugural website to all 50 states.
Once updated, the Atlas will serve as a wellspring for envisioning new metrics and communicating compelling policy reform narratives to the public at large, governmental associations, justice advocates, academic researchers, and journalists at the national and local levels.
View Sample Maps from the Atlas
The Justice Audit is an updateable, online, fully visualized and interactive, data-driven account of the operations, resources, and governance of criminal justice agencies from crime and policing through prosecution and court adjudication to detention and sentencing.
Key metrics from each criminal justice agency are brought together and for the first time visualized within the framework of a single integrated data site. Thus, the Audit goes beyond representations of agency operations isolated from one and other to provide a lens on how operations and outcomes in the bailiwick of each agency might be affecting the others, thus revealing opportunities for coordinated policy action.
The Justice Audit incorporates not only big data from government agencies, but also intertwines results of a public opinion survey and practitioner interviews. It is designed to be updated annually, ensuring that crucial analyses are systematically reproduced each year and that stakeholders can track progress against goals over time.
Justice Mapping works in partnership with the Governance & Justice Group (GJG), which founded and leads the international Justice Audit initiative. Led by GJG, and along with our data visualization partners, we completed nationwide Audits of the Bangladesh South Central Somalia criminal justice systems and are implementing another in Somaliland.
Domestically, Justice Mapping is working with the Aspen Institute Justice and Governance Partnership to design and implement much expanded community anchored Audits in 5 - 10 sites across the US.
The Justice Audit
Justice Reinvestment
Million Dollar Blocks
50%
Justice Mapping is committed to supporting reforms of the national Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) which better meet its community investment goals. Over the first 15 years of its emergence, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative has provided technical assistance to dozens of states around the country and become a Bureau of Justice Assistance program designed to help states lower prison populations.
When originally conceived, prison reduction savings were meant to be reinvested in and leverage wider community development activities that could alleviate criminogenic neighborhood conditions. In practice, reinvestment has been restricted mostly to strengthening community corrections and law enforcement.
Today, community development institutions, neighborhood non-profits, reentry programs, and other local actors are increasingly sophisticated about leveraging their intimate knowledge of the strengths and struggles of neighborhood residents into successful initiatives. Moreover, widely accessible computer mapping information systems are making it possible to broker smarter, more geographically targeted solutions to long standing challenges.
Justice Mapping is committed to supporting a rethinking of the community dimension of Justice Reinvestment and helping local jurisdictions deploy both information technology and subject area expertise to formulate and implement government partnered community reinvestment priorities.
Read Cadora's discussion of the emergence of Justice Reinvestment and prognosis for its evolution.
Visit Justice Strategies for a critique of Justice Reinvestment and assessment of its future.
Visit Transforming Safety Colorado for an innovative approach to community reinvestment.