This map shows where LA’s jail population comes from
A new map shows the city and county of Los Angeles in a new light. Using data from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a team of researchers from UCLA working with a…
By George Lavender • • 1 min readA new map shows the city and county of Los Angeles in a new light.
Using data from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a team of researchers from UCLA working with a number of community organizations have created a map that shows where people booked into the county jails come from.
The result is “Million Dollar Hoods,” a patchwork map of the city and county. According to the project lead, UCLA Associate Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the map is designed to show “the costs of incarceration in Los Angeles” as well as the fact that “those costs are not equally spread across the city and the county.”
Take Westmont, the neighborhood featured in the first episode of KCRW’s Off the Block. Lytle Hernandez and her team found that over five years there were nearly 6,000 arrests from this small neighborhood and residents spent a combined total of more than 128,000 days in jail. In all, the mapping team estimates that more than $14 million was spent incarcerating people who live in Westmont.
For now, the map only shows booking data provided by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, but the team says they plan to add another map based on information from the Los Angeles Police Department.