A graduate student at New York University has undertaken a project to catalogue all 5,393 correctional facilities currently operational in the United States. Using satelite imagery from Google, Josh Begley has gathered birds-eye views of each of these prisons and placed them on a single webpage. The result is Prison Map, a strangely-beautiful, yet somewhat unnerving view of the state of incarceration in this country.
“A lot of times we’ll just use numbers to talk about this idea of mass incarceration,” Begley tells The Atlantic magazine, “and I thought that there maybe was something powerful about using no numbers, no words and just having the images.”
The result is indeed powerful. Scrolling through what seems to be a never-ending catalogue of correctional institutions serves as a reminder of how many individuals are in fact incarcerated in this country. This is further underscored when you realize that only 14 percent of the prisons for which Begley has images are actually included in the website.
There is an odd beauty to many of the prisons when seen from above. Many of the facilities are angular and very symetrical, appearing as if they were neatly positioned upon a patchwork of rural fields and country roads. Other prisons appear to be carved into out-of-the-way forests or dropped into the middle of arid wasteland, while still others hide in the midst of more urban and residential settings.
“The takeaway, at least for me, is really about this notion of space,” says Begley. “The amount of sheer materials that have had to go into building these buildings for the purposes of essentially warehousing people is really impossible for me to wrap my head around.”