The prison in the city: Tracking the neoliberal life of the “million dollar block”

Abstract

The concept of the ‘million dollar block’ refers to the spatially concentrated urban origins of the US prison population, most of whom come from a handful of neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. Visualized through a series of maps charting home addresses alongside financial costs of imprisonment, the million dollar block has emerged as a powerful rhetorical umbrella for bipartisan collaboration on prison reform. This article critically tracks the way the million dollar block, as both a cartography and a discursive formation, has travelled politically over the past decade. Finding parallels with the ‘neighborhood effects’ discourse within urban studies, I suggest the million dollar block similarly functions to cast poor and racialized urban spaces primarily in terms of criminogenic risk. I describe how the discursive cartography of the million dollar block, despite its reformist intentions, serves a neoliberal model of prison reform, rationalizing increased carceral state intervention in urban space.