Why, as a Society, Do We Choose to Model Cruelty and Vengeance?
Recent events such as the murder of Breonna Taylor on March 13, 2020 brought to light issues with the cruelty and vengeance model of North America's current "public safety" system. The current incarceration system, or the prison–industrial complex, criminalizes people who pose no significant safety risk to the public. Prison abolitionists and the movement to defund the police call for a shift to a more proactive stance. By prioritizing investments in community health and safety, we can provide the resources needed to prevent punishment and violence as a means to accomplish public safety.
Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) has contended since the launch of their "Alternatives to Incarceration" campaign that an appropriate design response to mass incarceration is to refuse commissions for prisons.1 The ADPSR shares the values of the prison abolition movement in “calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, and health care instead of prison infrastructure—all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life.”2
Ruth Wilson Gilmore suggests that “the practice of putting people in cages is a central feature in the development of secular states, participatory democracy, individual rights, and contemporary notions of freedom.”3 In a depersonalized society, this system wedged between ethics and law was to make people feel safe among a "society of strangers."4 In theory, the justice system was designed to be righteous, yet those who fill prisons have collectively lacked political clout, and have dominantly been working or workless poor, most of whom are not white.5
Taking a look at the four concepts that Gilmore presents on why societies decide they should lock people up; retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation; we can see how prisons do not accomplish what they pretend.6 Research suggests more policed, and imprisoned neighbourhoods produce greater instability, which makes me question the likelihood of retribution and deterrence. Rehabilitation is also improbable since it has been concluded that prison cells can induce or worsen mental illness, and released prisoners are met with laws and fiscal constraints that lock them out of education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday life.7 Prisons not only have violated human rights and failed at rehabilitation; it is not even clear that prisons deter crime or increase public safety.
So, Why Was There a Massive Growth in North American Prisons in the 1980s?
Gilmore states that the most accepted explanation is that more prisons were built as an effect of increased crime. She discredits this by showing us statistics of crime rates dropping in 1980, two years before the start of the prison boom. She says, “while social deviance might not have increased, aggressive intolerance pays handsome political dividends as crime became public anxiety number one.”8
If the prison boom wasn’t the result of increased crime, we must look to other explanations. Among these are racial cleansing, the pursuit of profits, incarceration to provide jobs to rural areas, and the reform school.9 Of these, there are certain explanations of prison growth that people cling to such as "a significant number of people are in prison for nonviolent drug convictions; that prison is a modified continuation of slavery, and, by extension, that almost everyone in prison is Black; and that corporate profit motive is the primary engine of incarceration."10 Gilmore scrutinizes these explanations, arguing that the problem with these common misconceptions isn't just that they are false, but that they reinforce racial stereotypes and allow for policy positions aimed at minor or misdirected reforms. For Gilmore, “prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crisis, organized by the state.”11 While others, including Raphael Sperry, cite "mandatory minimum sentences, the “War on Drugs,” and three-strikes laws and so on as the proximate causes of the prison population boom."12 Whether or not racial cleansing was the cause of the prison boom, racial disparity in the prison system is evident, as two-thirds of the U.S. prison population is Black or Latin American.13 As Sperry states, we often see that “Structural racism pervades the criminal justice system as people of colour are disproportionately targeted for police stops, tougher charges, more frequent conviction, and longer sentences.”14
The causality of the prison-industrial complex may not be particularly clear, as we see from Sperry and Gilmore’s critical perspectives. Still, the effects in the communities that surround prisons can be seen and addressed.
Does the Architect, Planner or Designer Have an Ethical Duty to Work for Public Benefit?
While architects do not decide the treatment of prison occupants or the buildings’ size and density, they are arguably accomplices by providing spaces essential to the operator’s inhumane activities. “The walls and locks of a prison trap inmates in crowded proximity. The predictable consequence is hostile interaction; rape, assault, and murder, that is said to be unofficial punishment facilitated by building design.”15 The building type involves a clear intent to violate well-established interpretations of international human rights standards, an argument the ADPSR included in their petition to The American Institute of Architects (AIA).16
Sperry warns us that while several case studies for more sensitive prison design show us that incarceration can be transformed into a truly rehabilitating endeavour, we should be wary of “better” prisons as conversations about public investment in community health and safety can have far more transformative outcomes.17 Prisons sit on the edge but are not an isolated infrastructure. Government organized and funded dispersal of marginalized people from urban to rural locations suggests that problems stretch across space in a connected way and that arenas for activism are less segregated than they seem.18 Gilmore and Sperry both argue that geography is essential as strategies and investments must be contextualized and targeted in particular areas and with a fine-grained spatial logic.19 ADPSR recommends that planners and design professionals engage with a community-design model to accurately identify the community’s individualized needs. They also call for a planning approach that brings together the criminal justice and public health fields, so that communities can assess their assets and needs together.20 In conclusion, the Prison Abolition movement calls for architects and designers to not only redesign prisons themselves but to work across disciplines to redesign the entirety of the prison-industrial complex. A call to not blindly meet the needs of our clients, but instead, to consider social justice and activism as part of our fields.
1 Raphael Sperry, “Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign,” Scapegoat, no. 7 (Fall/Winter, 2014): 30.
2 Ibid, 29-37.
3 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Introduction,” in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 11.
4 Ibid, 15.
5 Ibid,12.
6 Ibid, 14.
7 Ibid, 17.
8 Ibid, 20.
9 Ibid, 20.
10 Rachel Kushner, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind,” New York Times, April 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html.
11 Wilson Gilmore, “Introduction,” 26.
12 Sperry, “Architecture, Activism, and Abolition,” 29.
13 Wilson Gilmore, “Introduction,” 7.
14 Sperry, “Architecture, Activism, and Abolition,” 29.
15 Arthur Allen, “A Dilemma of Democracy: Architecture, Politics and Prison Design,” Vancouver, June 5, 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304085070_A_Dilemma_of_Democracy
16 Sperry, “Architecture, Activism, and Abolition,”34.
17 Ibid, 35.
18 Wilson Gilmore, “Introduction,” 11.
19 Sperry, “Architecture, Activism, and Abolition,” 36.
20 Ibid.
