On Prisons and Freedom: a tale of two cities

My experiments with cartograms were inspired by the work of the people who did not only made cartograms more popular than ever, but who also did invaluable work in making the creation of cartograms a lot easier than it was! The World Mapper Team has published over 600 cartograms on its web site. So many that only later, after being advised by somebody else, I found out they already had published a cartogram on imprisonment.

 World Prison Population and Incarceration Rates

Cartogram by Maps at Work

Data:  International Centre for Prison Studies. King's College (London, UK)

This particular cartogram however is different; it is a bi-variate version.The size of the countries indicates the total prison population: the bigger the country the more people in prison. In turn, the hue indicates the incarceration rates. For example, China and the U.S. have similar total prison populations (expressed approximately same land area), but China (light hue) imprisons relatively few of its citizens as compared to the US (dark color).

Cartograms are an underused technique. Not only for geography teaching, but also for advocacy mapping.

Contrary to conventions I put the higher numbers and the darker hues at the bottom of the legend, because I feel the more people a country has to incarcerate the lower its has sunk (So, Lakoff's 'More is Up'  maybe is not a universal metaphor). Does this mean that the countries with light hue do well? By no means. They may have good government and cultural mechanisms that prevents excessive crime and violence, have more formal or informal restorative justice, more humane forms of punishment than imprisonment, but just as well an incompetent police force and inefficient justice system, or effective preventive repression.

Here is another map. Not on imprisonment, but on 'freedom'. Maps can be bold, and this one certainly is. How many assumptions, political stances, and economic interest is there behind this map. How is freedom understood, defined and measured? Freedom for who? Freedom of what? And the bottom line: Who has the freedom to define what freedom is? Its all hidden behind the map's surface. As simply as a traffic light: Red, Green, and a colour in between. Now anybody can understand where freedom can be found and where not. As simple as that! Freedom, poor little girl, everybody's maiden.

Freedom House world map 2009

Source: Freedom House