Designing for Post-Incarceration

“Designing for Post-Incarceration,” as a recent symposium at the Center for Architecture put it, means investing in people today to make incarceration obsolete tomorrow. It means recasting housing and mental healthcare as public safety concerns. It means breaking a very profitable economic circuit for good. But though those assembled on the night—academics and activists in the fields of social and criminal justice, architects and developers, as well as elected officials and policymakers—agreed on some or most of this, they were less sure about the first half of the panel title.

To be sure, there was much talk of designing “more humane environments.” Topeka K. Sam of The Ladies of Hope Ministries shared an impression from a young woman who told her, “Colors in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] remind me of the colors I saw visiting my baby’s father in Rikers. Even the smells at NYCHA are the same as the smells in prison.” Hernandez Stroud from the Brennan Center for Justice relayed a terrifying story of a prisoner who was literally “baked to death” in an Alabama prison. And as is often the case when architecture and the justice system are brought up in the same breath, the conversation swung to the Norway’s IKEA-inspired dorm-like prisons, where, Sam recounted, “prisoners had keys to their doors, windows that open, private showers, and prisoners and officers alike dress in casual clothes.” In 2019 the DeBlasio administration even sent a delegation to Norway to do precedent research for the Borough-Based Jails initiative.

But such calls for improving the physical environment of jails and prisons belie systemic problems associated with the punitive nature of the US justice system and the lack of a social safety net. Zellnor Myrie, a New York state senator, pointed out the irony of the term “correctional facilities,” when recidivism—as opposed to rehabilitation—is more likely the outcome. In a recorded address, NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams went as far as to argue that “prisons are not failing because they are not working, but rather because they are working exactly as designed.” Stanley Richards of the Fortune Society expanded on Williams’s observation: “We’re investing in punishment, but not the things that allow people to build lives.”

Much of the abolitionist agenda lies in the hands of policy-makers, i.e. putting more public funds into the social supports needed to address the precursors to crime and incarceration. Still, is there really nothing architects can do? Can they not leverage their connections to the networks of influence and private wealth that shape our cities? In the humble opinion of this writer, we can. We should actively question a client’s brief and their program, so that they not turn their backs on neighborhoods where they build. We should second-guess hermetic projects full of underutilized luxury amenities. We should advocate for policies that further inclusive development, affordable housing, and funding for, as Vera Institute’s Insha Rahman put it, “spaces that recognize humanity and dignity.”