It’s a slow Sunday evening in the most expensive area of town. The daytime heat has receded, opening up an evening of possibility—some golf, or perhaps a leisurely stroll; all-you-can-eat sushi or an old-school backyard barbecue; head to the movies or make it a Blockbuster night. Kids play tag on open swaths of grass. A group of women sit in a front yard eagerly awaiting food from Moreno’s Catering. A young man wheels around a four-foot-high black speaker, ready to get the party started.
As the San Antonio Spurs whip the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 2 of the NBA finals, a half-dozen past-their-prime guys play a spirited game of pick-up basketball on a fenced court that’s within punting distance of the freeway. On the opposite end of the court, a small boy (cap turned backward and about the size of three basketballs stacked atop each other) repeatedly kicks an American flag-colored volleyball into a nearby brick wall.
An apparent homeless man digs through a trash Dumpster behind the Boys and Girls Club - Photograph by Richard Brian
The writing on the wall conveys a message that rings louder than words, a message he may or may not understand: “28th Street,” “F--k Twinkies.” The 28th Street Raskals are the ruling gang; their graffiti-ed tag is X-ed out and Twinkies, a derogatory name coined by their rivals, is written next to it. This is the language of war—gang war; familiar for this area of town. Over here, you’ll not find mansions nor Maybachs or other remnants of success. Housing options tend toward dilapidated government-subsidized complexes, cheap apartments and old homes. The fanciest of cars—Cadillacs—sport shiny rims called “Dees,” or “Daytons” or “Dana Danes.”
Last year, this 5.8-mile region, the 89101—bordered by Bonanza and Charleston to the north and south and Mojave Road and 13th Street to the east and west—accounted for the state’s highest incarceration rate, making it the most expensive community in terms of taxpayer subsidies for prisoners. According to the nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Mapping Center, 89101 was responsible for $7.3 million in prison expenditures in 2006, or nearly one-fifth of the $38 million the Nevada Department of Corrections annually spends on prison admissions. (The 89106 zip code accounted for $7 million in prison admissions costs last year, followed by 89030 in North Las Vegas, with $5.9 million.) Metro stats indicate the area’s still a criminal hot bed: dozens of family disturbances and assaults in the last 60 days.
The Justice Mapping Center’s Eric Cadora says staff sifted through Nevada Department of Corrections data to determine Nevada’s findings. The research extends the work begun by the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Spatial Information Design Lab, which has chronicled the phenomenon of “Million Dollar Blocks,” urban census blocks where so many residents are in prison that it costs at least $1 million to incarcerate them. With this information, Cadora says the goal is to develop plans to stop neighborhoods from becoming pipelines to prison—so that the carefree toddler kicking the volleyball on a basketball court on 28th Street doesn’t became a statistic.