Participatory Sketch Mapping for Policy: A Case Study of Reentry Housing from Chicago

Abstract

This article describes a qualitative research project that used sketch maps and individual interviews to involve formerly incarcerated people in the process of creating data and crafting policy recommendations related to reentry housing in Chicago, Illinois. It discusses the benefits as well as the limits of participation in this process and considers the merits of sketch mapping as a method for involving marginalized people in the process of policy creation and advocacy. Because housing is both foundational to returning residents’ successful reentry and especially difficult for them to secure, this project highlights the importance of elevating the perspectives of individuals affected by punitive policies to consider the nuances of lived experience and inspire decision makers to enact reforms.

本文描述了一项定性研究。在美国伊利诺伊州芝加哥市的再安置住房的数据和政策方面, 本文通过示意图和个人采访, 让刑满释放人员参与到创建数据、拟定政策建议的过程中。讨论了让刑满释放人员参与该过程的好处和局限, 考虑了采用示意图让边缘人群参与政策制定和宣传的优点。住房是刑满释放人员成功再安置的基础, 也是这些人员特别难以获取的。本文强调了重视受惩罚性政策影响人员的观点的重要性, 进而考虑生活体验的差别、鼓励决策者实施改革。

Este artículo describe un proyecto de investigación cualitativa que usó mapas en croquis y entrevistas individuales para involucrar gente que estuvo encarcelada en un proceso de creación de datos y formulación de recomendaciones políticas relacionadas con la vivienda de reinserción en Chicago, Illinois. En el artículo se discuten tanto los beneficios como los límites de participación en este proceso, y se consideran los méritos del mapeo de croquis como método para implicar la gente marginada en el proceso de creación de política y defensa de los derechos. Debido a que la vivienda es fundacional para el éxito de la reinserción de los residentes que retornan. e igualmente difícil para ellos conseguirla, este proyecto destaca la importancia de elevar la perspectiva de quienes son afectados por políticas punitivas, para considerar los matices de las experiencias vividas e inspirar a quienes han de tomar decisiones para que las reformas se promulguen.

Key Words:

• Chicago
• housing
• policy
• reentry
• sketch mapping

关键词:

• 芝加哥
• 住房
• 政策
• 再安置
• 示意图。

Palabras clave:

• Chicago
• mapeo de croquis
• política
• reingreso
• vivienda

Acknowledgments

I thank Charlie Barlow and Laura Nussbaum-Barberena, as well as student researchers Declan Jones, Maria Alvarez, Thanh Ngo, Tanvi Singh, and Nancy Quiroz (then of Roosevelt University’s Policy Research Collaborative) for their assistance with this research project. Lindsey LaPointe and Tyrone Muhammad provided crucial support and guidance during data collection and analysis. For reading drafts of this article and offering invaluable suggestions, I thank Jonnell Robinson, Patrick Oberle, and two anonymous reviewers. I thank Joe Stoll for his assistance with some of the figures for this article. All remaining errors or oversights are my own.

Notes

1 Precise data on prison and jail releases are difficult to locate. Prison admissions generally correlate roughly to exits, however, and there were between 11,000 and 13,000 new admissions to the Illinois Department of Corrections from Cook County annually between 2010 and 2014 (Olson and Stemen 2015). As of 31 December 2020, 10,610 adults were on parole in Cook County (IDOC 2020c). This figure does not include local jail exits. Nationally, one in three Americans has some kind of criminal record (The Sentencing Project 2015).

2 The author of this article collected approximately two thirds of the sketch maps and interviews; student researchers or Roosevelt University Policy Research Collaborative staff collected the remaining one third.

3 For comparison, as of 31 October 2020, the Illinois prison population was about 55 percent Black, 32 percent White, 13 percent Hispanic, and less than 1 percent Native American (IDOC 2020b).

4 Although participants were able to self-identify their gender, everyone surveyed selected either male or female.

5 Inevitably, the design and scale of the maps introduced potential bias. Finer scaled, zoomed-in maps showing individual blocks would likely have led to more granular results, and including either no landmarks or different sets of streets might have altered how participants responded (see Sloan et al. 2016). For the purposes of our study, the provided base map struck a useful balance between specificity, helping the reader to identify specific neighborhoods or zones of the city, and generality, providing a sense of city-wide trends and patterns. If somewhat blunt, this city-wide map with only limited markings accomplished what was intended, but future research might consider using smaller scale maps to produce finer grained results.

6 Participant names were not collected to protect participant privacy. All names provided in this article are pseudonyms.

7 The team decided not to digitize the maps using a GIS for several reasons: In particular, team members had limited mapping skills and access to just one license of ArcMap, with limited extensions enabled. Limited GIS training and institutional resources in turn guided analysis. Ultimately, tracing by hand provided the best available method to use the team members’ skills and resources and preserve the integrity of the hand-drawn sketches. The resulting map served the purposes of this qualitative study, although future studies could certainly make fruitful use of results digitized in a GIS.

8 Multiple other studies have used a similar technique of creating a chloropleth map based on an aggregate count of how many times a particular area was selected (see Brennan-Horley and Gibson 2009; Lopez and Lukinbeal 2010; Ogneva-Himmelberger et al. 2019).

9 It should be noted that such aggregate maps are subject to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), originally identified by Gehlke and Biehl (1934), in which the results shift depending on the selected areas to which data are aggregated. Because this was a qualitative study in which similar patterns were observed despite the shifting areal units, the MAUP does not present a significant source of bias for the purposes of this study. Should additional statistical analysis be performed, however, this would need to be taken into account.

10 Scholars also note that MAUP can lead to ecological fallacies, in which conclusions about individuals are erroneously drawn from aggregate data (Tranmer and Steel 1998). For this study, the purpose of creating the aggregate areal units was not to generalize conclusions about individuals but rather to understand where most participants believed they were most likely to find a place to live in the city (or not).

11 See Boschmann and Cubbon (2014) for discussion of sketch maps’ potential to capture individual and collective experiences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Madeleine Hamlin

MADELEINE HAMLIN is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244. E-mail: [email protected]. She studies the intersection of housing and carceral geographies in U.S. cities and previously worked as a policy analyst in Chicago, Illinois.