For a class I took at Berkeley on the US Prison Industrial Complex, as a final project I created a geographical rendering of the United States to show the distribution of prisoners across the country.
I remember one day walking out of my prison discussion and I heard someone describe the prison industrial complex as an ugly wound on America. I found this to be particularly interesting as an artistic statement. So I made a map. I was inspired by Josh Begley's work on taking data on the prisons and making a visual representation, and so I expanded on it. I found the location of every single federal prison - I had wanted to include state and local incarceral spaces but the data is simply unavailable or extremeley inaccessible in many parts - and I wrote a program that maps each federal incarceral space based on the number of human souls it contains.
What happens next is stunning. I changed my code slightly so that in order to actually see the United States, and see a physical representation of the wounds inflicted, one must, at least briefly, acknowledge the prisoners held within, and acknowledge their existence. In order to see what the United States really looks like with all of the wounds and disease that is the prison industrial complex, one must first acknowledge the human souls it contains.