Million Dollar Hoods | Mapping the fiscal & human impact of incarceration

LASD Dashboard
Introducing our first interactive dashboard to learn more about how much is spent to jail residents of Los Angeles County.

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Million Dollar Hoods.
Research.
Trained in quantitative and qualitative methods, our research team includes students, staff, and faculty based at UCLA as well as community members throughout California.
Community.
Our approach centers the analysis of the communities most impacted by mass incarceration.

RAPID RESPONSE REPORTS
Justice.
Our mission is to advance racial justice through “critical research and community engagement”

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Welcome to MIllion Dollar Hoods

We map and document the fiscal and human costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County operates the largest jail system in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. At a cost of nearly $1 billion annually more than 27,000 people are caged every night in L.A.’s county jails and city lockups. But not every neighborhood is equally impacted by L.A.’s massive jail system. In fact, L.A.’s nearly billion-dollar jail budget is largely committed to incarcerating many people from just a few neighborhoods. In some communities, more than one-million dollars are spent annually on incarceration. These are L.A.’s Million Dollar Hoods.

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Who We Are and What We Do.

Based at UCLA and led by Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernandez and Dr. Danielle Dupuy, Million Dollar Hoods is an innovative research team comprised of students, staff, and community members trained in quantitative and qualitative methods. Our mission is to end mass incarceration. Our method is community driven. Our strategy is data focused. We begin every research project by acquiring comprehensive sets of local arrest and jail data. Then, we work collaboratively with community-based organizations to analyze that data and share our findings. To supplement our data work, our team conducts oral histories with system-impacted persons and is compiling an unprecedented archive of historical records that detail the five decades of mass incarceration in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities.

$19,386,418,544

in bail money levied by LAPD between 2012 and 2016

16,466 Years

Collective Years Women spent in LA County Jail (2010-2016)