| With the advent of pc-based computer mapping, a new tool became available to agencies and organizations in any number of public and private sectors to conduct spatial analyses. In the criminal justice system, the most heralded application of this new tool was crime hotspot analysis. At the same time, organizations interested in community development also began to employ geographic information system analysis techniques to produce community-based asset maps. As applications of GIS have grown, corrections too has begun to explore ways in which computer mapping can expand their analytical repertoire. In 1998, the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES) established a new program, the Community Justice Project (CJP), in great part on the power of analyses it had been conducting on mapping offenders. The Community Justice Project promotes a re-investment policy on the part of corrections to better deploy its resources in those neighborhoods with high concentrations of resident offenders. The CJP provides justice officials and community organizations help in community organizing, place-based budgeting, and program design. But central all these areas of assistance is community mapping. As produced by the CJP, community mapping brings together three kinds of information about a neighborhood: (1) locations and characteristics of crime and offenders; (2) measures of neighborhood well-being, such as employment rates; and, (3) community assets, such as nonprofit services. CJP employs community mapping to assess the correctional resources devoted to managing offenders on a block-by-block basis for any given neighborhood, help corrections agencies rethink their investment policies, and work with community constitutents to plan more strategic, neighborhood-based correctional programs. |
Updated 05/20/2006