Design
Mapping Chicago's 'Million Dollar Blocks'
The costs of incarceration are concentrated in low-income, predominantly black communities in the city.
In America, $22,000 can pay for a lot of things. It’s a little over the average annual cost of attending a four-year university. It’s a little under the annual per-client cost of ‘housing first’ programs for the homeless, across several cities. And it’s just under the average annual cost to house one inmate in a minimum-security federal prison.
The Illinois Department of Corrections, too, spends about $22,000 per year on each of its inmates—a conservative estimate, based on sentence lengths. In Chicago, this spending is largely concentrated on residents from low-income, segregated, and predominantly black communities.