Pictured: Most correctional facilities in the United States, from county jails to federal prisons. There are thousands.

Incarceration at Scale

If you're like me, you probably looked at this map and said, "Wow, that is a *lot* of dots!". In fact, you may even have family or friends that have been to these places - I know I do. The fact is, people in the US are more likely to be incarcerated than citizens in any other country, with an incarceration rate of about 650 adults per 100,000 (children are counted separately, though there are about 50,000 children incarcerated at the time of writing). As I learned more about the sheer magnitude of the carceral industry in the US, I decided to find a way to visualize these ideas. The data here is largely open-source data, though I've used Python to clean some records and do some reverse geocoding, mining the coordinates of each facility for this visualization. Full credit to the original source for sharing their data.