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…