By Sarah Lawrence, Jeremy Travis
The Urban Institute
April 2004

In recent decades, growth in the number of people in U.S. prisons has been the largest in history - the prison population increased by more than one million between 1980 and 2000. To accommodate this growth, corrections officials have pursued a variety of strategies, including greatly expanding the network ... This report contributes to the limited knowledge base by developing an empirical understanding of the geographic locations of prison facilities - and therefore prisoners - following this record-level expansion over the past two decades.

http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410994_mapping_prisons.pdf