The Geography of Incarceration

Josh Begley, a graduate student studying Interactive Telecommunications at New York University has created a website showing the satellite images of correctional facilities in the U.S.. The page shows the satellite images of around 700 U.S. prisons (which is about 14% of the total number of prisons).

Prison Map is a great resource for anyone who is interested in the geography of incarceration. For example it would be interesting to analyse the images to see how many of the prison buildings were influenced by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon designs.

Josh used the Google Static Maps API with a little self-written hack to save each map tile as an image file.

To find the locations of the prisons Josh used Prisoners of the Census' Correctional Facility Locator 2010, which allows you to search for and view on Google Maps all correctional facilities counted in the 2010 Census.