The Carceral EJ Mapper is a tool for examining the proximity of carceral facilities in the United States to various environmental hazards. Within the context of a US state, users may apply filter conditions to determine which carceral facilities have at least a certain number of superfund sites, brownfields, and other sites of toxic pollution within a given proximity to the facility. The tool is useful for identifying carceral facilities and incarcerated people on the frontlines of environemntal injustice in the US.
Deckard Barnes, Brittany Bates, Ben Millam, Priyanshi Nigam, Lindsay Poirier, Savannah Ramirez, Michelle Servin, & Nicholas Shapiro. (2021, March 31). Carceral EJ Mapper (Version 1.1.2). Zenodo.
Contributions | Name (alpha order) |
---|---|
π’ π» π€ | Deckard Barnes |
π’ π» π€ | Brittany Bates |
π» π π€ | Ben Millam |
π’ π€ | Priyanshi Nigam |
π’ ππ» π π€ | Lindsay Poirier |
π’ π π π€ | Savannah Ramirez |
π’ π€ | Michelle Servin |
π’ π π€ | Nick Shapiro |
(For a key to the contribution emoji or more info on this format, check out βAll Contributors.β)
You can access a working version of this application here.
Questions, bug reports, and feature requests can be submitted to this repo's issue queue.
All code in this repo is licensed with a GNU General Public License 3.0. Please see the license file for details.
All written materials are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0). Please see this license for details.
Contact hack-for-california@ucdavis.edu
In the Fall of 2019, contributors to this project began identifying environmental hazards that, when sited in proximity to carceral facilities, may indicate high degrees of exposure to toxicants amongst incarcerated people. The team researched open government geospatial datasets indicating the location of these hazards, and the above listed data sources represent the results of that research.
In the coming months, we intend to add PFAS sites and glyphosate use to the map.
We intend to replace the map's source data files on at least a bi-annual basis, contingent on the data producer's update process.
The code for the proximity app is stored entirely in proximity-app/app.R of this repo. All code has been commented.
Original data files are stored in proximity-app/data-original, and the cleaned data files (the files used on the map) are stored in proximity-app/data-clean.
Scripts for cleaning each of the data files are stored in the proximity-app/cleaning-scripts directory. Anything ending in -data-load-and-clean.R is a file designed to load and filter a source dataset, add census tract information, and then output the cleaned data. Perhaps most importantly, the filter functions in app.R rely on a dataset produced by a file in cleaning-scripts called find_objects-proximate_prisons.R. This file calculates the distance of every carceral facility to every environmental hazard within 5000 meters of that facility and stores the results in a data file. This file outputs proximity-app/data-clean/prisons_with_facility_distances.csv, which app.R references when a user filters the map to carceral facilities with x number of x hazards within x meters of the facility.
File an issue via this repo's issue queue.
Write code to fix issues or to create new features. When contributing code, please be sure to: