Theoretical Criminology 1–20 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1362480615625764 tcr.sagepub.com The prison in the city: Tracking the neoliberal life of the “million dollar block” Brett Story City University of New York, USA 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. Keywords Crime mapping, criminalization, mass incarceration, neighborhood effects, neoliberalism, prison reform, urban space Introduction: Mapping the prison in the city through the million dollar block The prison and the city have long been intimately related. Each has been structurally bound up with the social and economic transformations of the other since at least the Corresponding author: Brett Story, The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, The Graduate Center Room 6107, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Ave New York, NY 10016, USA. Email: brett.story@utoronto.ca 625764TCR 0 0 10.1177/1362480615625764Theoretical CriminologyStory research-article 2016 Article by guest on January 22, 2016 tcr.sagepub.com Downloaded from