The Future of Incarceration

TEN STORIES HIGH and clad in razor wire, the Brooklyn House of Detention, closed since 2003, is considered a hulking eyesore by local residents. But New York City's Department of Corrections wants to make it bigger. Two years ago, Martin Horn, the corrections commissioner, announced plans to reopen the facility and double its 749-bed capacity with a new addition. Located on Atlantic Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, the jail is convenient to the courthouse—and uncomfortably close, community members feel, to their brownstone neighborhoods with upscale cafés and shops. To appease residents, Horn proposed a solution. What about wrapping the jail with commercial uses?

At an AIA-sponsored event in New York this past February, architects saw what a “jail with retail” might look like. The city's Department of Design and Construction asked Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to create a rendering of an improved façade with street-level shops and a grocery store. The city then issued an RFP for official design proposals for the development. It plans to reopen the expanded jail in 2012.

The Bridewell workhouse opens in London. Soon English workhouses become known for their deplorable living conditions.

Credit: Corbis

The House of Detention represents a small but growing movement in the oft-overlooked field of justice architecture: jails that don't look like jails. James Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association, says the trend is gaining momentum, particularly in large urban areas. Gondles was a sheriff himself in Arlington, Va., where he helped oversee the construction of a new jail—the Arlington County Detention Center—that followed this maxim. “We didn't want it to look like a jail, and it doesn't. It looks like an office building,” Gondles says.

This exterior treatment is just part of the story. The last 25 years have seen a steady revision in the thinking behind justice design, culminating in new architecture for jails, juvenile detention centers, and, to a lesser extent, prisons. Architects specializing in these facilities are promoting better conditions for the incarcerated and the correctional staff through careful design considerations, bolstered by emerging science and strategic partnerships with correctional associations.

However, these advances come amid rising criticism of the American justice system as a whole. According to a Pew Charitable Trust report, one in 99 American adults will spend time behind bars in 2008, and with the taxpayer-footed cost to build and operate correctional facilities skyrocketing, some architects are boycotting the field of justice design altogether. At the heart of the debate is a provocative analysis of justice in this country and the role architects and designers should play.

The Brooklyn House of Detention expansion is not, in fact, a result of rising inmate population. Rather, it is an effort to streamline the system for those awaiting trial and sentencing (as well as for their families and lawyers). Currently, most inmates are housed in a complex of nine separate jail facilities on Rikers Island, in the East River between Queens and the Bronx. Some 350,000 people visit Rikers on an annual basis. The DOC hopes that decentralizing the population into community jails in Brooklyn and the Bronx will expedite the system. “Every day, we have to bus 1,500 inmates to courts all around the city and bus most of them back,” explains Stephen Morello, a DOC spokesman. When you're dealing with rush-hour traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, that's no small matter.

It's important to bear in mind the basic distinction between jails and prisons. Jails are locally operated and funded, used to confine people before and after adjudication. Those arrested can cycle in and out, with many spending only 48 hours in the system. Inmates who were found guilty and sentenced to a jail are likely serving no more than a year. Prisons, on the other hand, are state- and federal-funded facilities for those who have been convicted and are likely serving longer sentences. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, at the end of 2006, state and federal prisons held 1,570,861 inmates, while local jails held 766,010 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence.

For a jail to function effectively within a community, it must work in lock-step with the rest of the justice system—from law enforcement and social services to courthouses and law offices. Ken Ricci of Ricci Greene Associates has been active in justice design since graduating from the Pratt Institute in the 1960s and has long advocated for improved, humane facilities. Ricci believes that locating jails in city centers close to other agencies is most helpful for those who have been arrested. “Jails are legitimate buildings in an urban environment. They are part of the civic landscape,” Ricci says. When designing a jail, he adds, you have to consider the totality of the system. “You must always ask yourself how you can reduce the time of the stay for the inmate.”

Getting communities to accept a new jail can be a challenge, especially when it's coming to the center of town. Most prefer jails to be buffered from society or, better yet, consigned to an island like Rikers. This is where exterior design comes in. One major change in recent decades is that jails have gone from more traditional, round or linear models, with cells lining the perimeter or circling a guard tower, to a more pod-like orientation. In this configuration, housing units ring around a central dayroom, a setup that has obvious advantages for the inmates inside. By contrast, on the cell model, “If you do a cell window, you wind up with a 5-inch slit because that's the size you can't get a head through,” says Andy Cupples, a principal at DMJM H&N. “Once you do that, it's very prison-like.”

The pod strategy gives rise to improvements outside and in. For a new jail in downtown Denver, scheduled to open in 2010, Ricci Greene has created, with Hartman-Cox Architects and OZ Architecture, an interior from which inmate quarters look onto a recreation yard that's open to the sky. “As a pedestrian on the street, you can't see this, but as an inmate you can access the outside,” Ricci says.

While more prevalent in urban settings, the push to fit in is not reserved for cities alone. DMJM H&N was part of a design-build team for the Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center in horse country outside of Lexington, Ky. (Ricci Greene also consulted on the project.) Neighbors were concerned that the 1,280-bed, 425,000- square-foot facility would clash with the landscape of sprawling fields peppered with horse barns. After a series of public meetings to discuss the design, the architects recessed the facility into a hill at the center of the site. The administration building, which is more visible to the public, is designed to look like an equine facility.

“Modern jails make good neighbors,” Ricci says. “But that is not the end of the story. You also have to look at the environment on the inside.”

The switch to a pod orientation in jails and prisons is not just aesthetic. Increasingly, correctional facilities are moving away from the remote supervision of inmates from separated control rooms or guard towers. This remote-supervision model was inspired, in part, by English theorist Jeremy Bentham and his panopticon (Greek for “all-seeing”). On Bentham's design, guards could observe inmates from a tower or cell without direct interaction. A modified panoptic design was used at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, which opened in 1997.

Today, however, a direct-supervision model, which places the officer in housing cells with the detainees, is becoming more popular. Direct-supervision facilities look to create a normative environment, in which the surroundings uphold healthy social norms. The model springs from a belief that the design impacts the inmate's frame of mind and that, by offering as “normal” an interior as possible, you can mitigate violence and aid rehabilitation.

Gone are the harsh steel chairs bolted to the floor. Gone are the dark rooms encased with bars. In their place are dayrooms designed to harness natural light and common areas outfitted with movable furnishings, carpeted flooring, and advanced double-glazed security glass without bars. Natural materials like wood are used when possible, and great care is given to acoustic levels. “When you reduce the decibel level, people's adrenaline level goes down, including the staff,” Ricci says.

Guards sit in the center of the unit and circulate through the space, which allows them to better interact with the population and help subdue conflict. When inmates act out, their privileges are revoked and they are removed to a more secure section of the building.

“Direct supervision is probably the greatest leap forward we've had in a long time,” says Jenny Hutchinson, the jails division chief at the National Institute of Corrections, an organization that frequently partners with architects on research, advocacy, and training. “It combines an architectural design with a philosophy of managing inmates. When it's done correctly, it can eliminate problems that we have considered inherent in jails, like violence and vandalism.”

She adds: “In a traditional jail, we inadvertently created a lot of bad behavior. We expected the worst of those inmates and we conveyed that by the way we interacted with them through the fixtures, the furnishings, and the design of the physical plant.”

Cupples, of DMJM H&N, thinks the direct-supervision facilities he designs have a positive impact. “I've always had this belief that what we do as architects is an art and a science, but also a social science, and that what we do can influence behavior.” In the case of his firm's award-winning, $29 million expansion of Pima County Justice Facility, a jail in Tucson, Ariz., the client wanted a safe, normative environment to reduce violence and support inmate release back into the community. The architects began by breaking down a large, 64-bed dormitory into eight, eight-person mini-dorms. This allows the inmates some level of privacy and greatly reduces noise within their housing areas. Inmates have access to dayrooms and outdoor recreation. Pima also added high-tech components, such as video visitation (another burgeoning trend in justice design), which allows families to visit during extended hours since staff do not have to physically move them to a visitation room.

Normative, direct-supervision designs are also being applied to juvenile detention centers. Ricci Greene Associates specializes in direct-supervision designs. The firm recently completed the Union County Juvenile Detention Center in New Jersey, a 70,000-square-foot building surrounding nearly an acre of outdoor space. Each housing unit centers around a dayroom with lots of glass and views to the outdoors, and every unit has its own recreation area. There is a full-scale gym as well as classrooms and resource centers.

So far, anecdotal evidence shows that direct supervision does better the environment for both inmates and staff. Before joining the National Institute of Corrections, Jenny Hutchinson spent seven years in the jail system as a correctional officer. She witnessed the transformation from remote to direct supervision firsthand. “I felt much safer,” she says. “I felt much more productive. I enjoyed working with inmates and felt as if I could use higher-level skills.” This is backed up by statistics being collected at the Pima facility. Arizona corrections chief Martha Cramer was so impressed that she wrote an article for Corrections Forum magazine extolling the jail's design and how it has reduced violent behavior and greatly improved the conditions for staff.

The cost to build direct supervision is not necessarily more than remote supervision, according to the NIC. Either way, it's a lot: According to the Pew Charitable Trust, states spend more than $40 billion a year on corrections.

Not surprisingly, given America's large incarcerated population, the trend around the country is definitely toward increased jail sizes. “We are in another cycle of upgrowth,” says Cupples. He speculates that part of the problem may be a system that doesn't do a good job at releasing offenders back into society. Many return to the system very quickly via new offenses or basic parole violations. “We're in a spiraling cycle that keeps feeding itself like a hurricane,” Cupples says.

That is exactly what concerns California-based architect Raphael Sperry. Sperry believes that no amount of design, however high-quality, can remedy the flaws that he sees as inherent in the American justice system, including a failing War on Drugs and three-strikes legislation. In 2004, Sperry and a group of volunteers launched the Alternatives to Prisons program (formerly known as Prison Boycott) through the nonprofit group Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. Nearly 1,000 architects and designers have signed a petition pledging to boycott the design, construction, or renovation of a jail or prison within their practice.

“You can design something with the best intentions, you can design something that's supposed to rehabilitate people, but there is no guarantee that it's going to be operated that way,” Sperry says. “The classrooms and gymnasiums in California jails, for example, are used for overflow housing.” Making jails and prisons larger won't have any effect on crime, Sperry says: “We've tried incarcerating everybody, and it isn't working. What we need are better solutions.”

In many ways, Ken Ricci is in agreement. He says that his firm has stopped designing prisons at the state and federal level because he does not believe architects can have much of an impact. As for jails: “Yes, I'm an architect and I want to build buildings, but there is something in our system that could be altered to reduce the size of our jails.” Ricci urges a big-picture approach to sustainable justice design that includes right-sizing jails and finding alternatives to incarceration (“LEED is very limiting for this building type,” he points out). He says that his firm has convinced clients to minimize the number of beds in a facility and look to the resources of social services. “Shouldn't our plan be to reduce the footprint and suggest that clients not solve everything through a building response?”

As for boycotting justice design altogether, Ricci doesn't believe architects have enough clout—rather, they should be in the trenches helping to change the system from within. “The need for law enforcement and justice is fundamental in any society.” That said, incarceration needs to be humane: “You go to prison as punishment. You don't go to prison for punishment. Prison should not be awful. It shouldn't be dangerous. The deprivation of your freedom, for an American, is punishment enough.”.

1300s

The Quaker William Penn settles Pennsylvania and creates a more humane house of correction based on labor.

1557

The Bridewell workhouse opens in London. Soon English workhouses become known for their deplorable living conditions.

1681

European fortresses start being used to house criminals, helping fortress design become the dominant architectural model for prisons.

1773

The Maison de Force is completed in Ghent, Belgium. It separates inmates by gender and offense, but still operates under the workhouse philosophy advanced in England.

1790

The Quakers manage parts of the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia. Reformers like Benjamin Franklin advance humane treatment of inmates and a design concept based on single, solitary cells.

1816

A prison in Auburn, N.Y., opens. Unlike the Pennsylvania jails, it includes communal areas for meals and recreation, with smaller cells for sleeping built vertically in multileveled tiers, called cell blocks. This becomes known as the Auburn system and is replicated in places like New York's Sing Sing prison for the next 150 years.

1934

The first super-maximum security prison (known as a supermax) in the U.S. opens on Alcatraz Island. This decade also saw a rise in large rural institutions, such as San Quentin, leading to the nickname “The Big House.”

1955

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners are passed, which recognize the basic human rights of prisoners and help establish regulations for prison design.

1970s

Judges begin to consider prisoners' rights and mandate significant improvements in prison conditions.

1975

French philosopher Michel Foucault publishes Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a popular book offering a critical analysis of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and the failure of the prison complex.

1981

The first direct-supervision jail opens in Contra Costa, Calif.

1984

The first privately operated prison is established in Tennessee. By 2006, 7.2 percent of American prisoners were held in private facilities.