Neighborhood safety can be measured in many ways: How many murders occur there, how trigger-happy the residents are, whether the local NYPD received that month's pepper-spray refills. Today in our ongoing examination of the City's data sources, we're taking a look at another metric: How many people are tossed in jail each year, broken down by the neighborhoods where they reside. Click through to check out our interactive charts, which will tell you where most prisoners call home, according to records from the NYC Department of Corrections.
2012 NYC Prisoners' Origin Zip Codes
This map shows where most NYC prisoners list their home address (these numbers do not include New York State prisons). Most prisoners' addresses tend to be listed in the South Bronx, Brownsville, East New York, Harlem, and Bed-Stuy. Brownsville residents were incarcerated in droves last year, with police sending 3,800 people to jail who hailed from just two zip codes: 11212 and 11207. (Keep in mind, this data shows where they live, not necessarily where they were arrested.) South Bronx was not far behind, with 1,796 residents from the 10456 zip code spending a night at the Chateau du NYPD.
As it turns out, fewer New Yorkers are getting sent to jail every year. In 2007, almost 109,491 people spent at least a night in an NYC jail. Last year, that number was down to 80,738, a significant decline over the past five years. Do these numbers mean the streets are getting safer? Not necessarily: there could be just as many criminals as five years ago, only the NYPD is not picking them up. (You know, lazy cops not meeting quotas.) Or it could mean fewer arrests on bogus charges, like low-level marijuana possession. Of course, we know that's not the case in neighborhoods with high stop-and-frisk rates.
Some neighborhoods have seen an increase in people sent to jail over the last five years. As the above chart shows, Chelsea, Murray Hill, Yorkville and Arden Heights on Staten Island all saw increases of at least 14% in residents sent to jail over the past five years. The Harlem-Morningside Heights area also saw 33 more prisoners last year than in 2007, amounting to a 3.3% increase.
Finally, the above map shows where NYC's prisoners from outside the city hail from. While all of the jailbirds come from East Coast, they hail from far and wide, from the Canadian border right down to near-Cuban waters. In Florida, you can see strong pockets of prisoners hailing from the Miami, Orlando and Tampa areas. Atlanta also seems to send plenty of prisoners our way, along with nearby Birmingham, AL.
The full data, which Gothamist retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act, can be seen below.
