American Civil Liberties Union

Last month, I wrote about the invisibility of Rikers Island on some of New York City's subway maps. Unfortunately, this weekend Hurricane Irene taught us that it's not just a map on a train that fails to acknowledge the thousands of people on the Island.

In a press conference Friday afternoon, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, despite the impressive array of hurricane evacuations and preparatory plans implemented to protect New Yorkers in other low-lying areas, Rikers Island would not be evacuated. Luckily for all of us, Irene's sweep through New York was much less disastrous than anticipated. Rikers Island was spared, but we learned something disturbing: the Department of Corrections does not have a large scale evacuation plan in place for the 12,000-plus prisoners of Rikers. Understandably, this revelation caused a flurry of backlash from concerned advocates.

This week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would invest $30 million from his own pocket to uplift the young black and Latino men who are most excluded from New York’s civic, educational and economic life. While this proposal is generous, it fails to address the fact that the Bloomberg administration has supported policies that have led to staggering racial disparities in New York’s corrections system. While funding job recruitment and education programs is indeed important, there’s a critical missing piece in this grand plan: ending NYPD’s widespread aggressive stop and frisk policies that target communities of color at skyrocketing rates and contribute markedly to the marginalization of the very same communities Bloomberg now aims to help.

Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history. And yet, our criminal justice system has failed on every count: public safety, fairness and cost-effectiveness. Across the country, the criminal justice reform conversation is heating up. Each week, we feature our some of the most exciting and relevant news in overincarceration discourse that we’ve spotted from the previous week. Check back weekly for our top picks.

Every cartographer has to leave something out. Street names, landmarks, tiny inlets — a two-dimensional rendering of our world can’t possibly include everything. This kind of selective exclusion reminds me of a specific khaki-colored mass of unmarked land on a map that I often find myself puzzling over during my commute. It hangs on the wall of every train car in New York City’s subway system, and I suspect a few of the other millions of people navigating this city glance at it occasionally, too.