Archi-Torture

Prison construction has become a booming business in the United States. Since the mandating of minimum sentencing for drug dealers and the “three strikes, you’re out” policy passed during the 1990s, more and more people are being put behind bars. Currently, the prison population has reached the two million mark, making the United States the country with the highest incarcerated rate out of all the democratic nations. With such a dramatic increase, overcrowding has developed in the existing prison stock throughout different jurisdictions. Many facilities handle double their occupancy by housing two inmates in a cell. In the Dauphine County Women Work-Release Facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for example forty-three women are housed in a building designed for thirteen juvenilie offenders.

A major source of the overcrowding problem is caused by the high return-rate of past offenders. Statistics show that more than 25.4% of released prisoners return to the criminal system within three years.[i] One reason behind the high recidivism rate is the unpreparedness of the released inmates who lack the job skills, social support and mental capacity to return successfully to society.  As a result, many of them fall back to their old habits and lifestyles, which eventually leads them back to the same route as before. The above condition has led legislators to re-examine their penal strategy.

Since post-colonial times, the goal of our penal system has been the rehabilitation of  prisoners; however, shifts in ideology have generated various methods in the implementation of rehabilitation and demanded different architectural responses to prison design. A move for a more humane approach, begun in the 1950s and 60s, has changed the predominate dark, decrepit, fortress-like jails of the nineteenth century into the well-lit, comfort-sensitive and group-orientated prisons of today. Whether design can do much to improve the long-term effects of imprisonment remains to be seen, but the possibility does exist.

Nevertheless, the direct relationship between penal philosophy and architecture illustrates how spatial design can be used as a device for disciplinary action. The inherent confining nature of a prison makes it arguably the building type that has the most impact on people’s behavior. It not only defines the limits of where people’s daily activities – such as sleeping, eating and exercising – occur, it can also produce emotional and psychological effects. According to a psychological analysis done on Supermax prisoners, long-term solitary confinement can create long-term negative effects on the inmates’ mental health leading to paranoia, hypersensitivity to noise, panic attacks, hallucinations and even episodes of amnesia.[ii]

Centuries before these analyses, the Quakers had already recognized the connection between spatial design and human behavior by developing a specific architectural language for their prison reform movement. Throughout the colonial period in America, criminals were punished according to the British penal philosophy of retribution and deterrence. It was believed that by subjecting the prisoners to harsh conditions, they would be discouraged from further criminal behavior. Methods of torture and gruesome executions were implemented and sentences were often disproportionate to the crime. The inhumaeness of these practices provoked the Quakers to argue for a new objective for the penal system that was based on rehabilitation rather than vengeance.

The Quakers’ solution was solitary confinement, which would permit the offenders to reflect, repent and reconnect with God through meditation. The idea of isolated containment was first invented by the British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, who wrote about the design of the panopticon, or the inspection house. In Bentham’s word, the panopticon is “a simple idea in architecture” where prisoners were kept separately in a series of cells that radiate around an observation tower [figure 1].[iii] Each cell was lit from behind, so that the prisoner’s activities became visible to the observer, but the prisoner’s view of the observer would be obscured by the light. This layout created an atmosphere where the prisoners felt they were being watched constantly while actually the observer could not possibly survey the entire prison at once.  This effect was described by the famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, as the ability “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”[iv] In addition to the idea of self-monitoring, Bentham also insisted on the incorporation of religion into the panopticon in the form of a chapel where prisoners could receive their religious instruction and practice regular devotion.

Sharing the same theological belief in prison reform, the Quakers adopted Bentham’s panopticon model for their ideal prison in Philadelphia. The Quakers believed that the prisoners could only be reformed through a process of self-reflection that would reconnect them with God, for it was only by the grace of God that a sinner could be saved. The practice of solitude in an isolation cell was regarded as the perfect environment to attain such a goal. By ways of meditation and self-examination in solitude, the prisoners were expected to experience a process of conversion that allowed them to recognize their guilt, repent and ask for God’s mercy. The prison, thus, resembled the monastery, while the prisoner was like a monk. This system of solitude confinement as a means of rehabilitation is identified as the Pennsylvania System. On March 20, 1821, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania approved the construction of the first state-managed solitary penitentiary in the United States, the Eastern State Penitentiary, also known as Cherry Hill.

Four architectural proposals were submitted for the design of the Eastern State Penitentiary and the one chosen was by the British architect John Haviland. The winning plan consisted of twelve bars of cells branching out from a central watchtower [figure 2]. Each bar was composed of a long corridor with cells running its entire length on both sides [figure 3]. The small austere individual cell measured about eight feet by twelve feet. Each inmate had his own exercise yard that was surrounded by twenty-foot high walls. The cell was constructed with nearly soundproof walls and all plumbing pipes were located on the exterior of the building to prevent prisoners from tapping on them. No whistling, singing or speaking aloud were permitted. Patrol officers wore cloth around their shoes and leather was strapped on the caster of the food cart to ensure absolute silence. Each cell was lit by a skylight, which not only provided the practical means for light and ventilation, but also symbolized ‘the eye of God’ that was constantly watching attentively upon the inmates [figure 4]. Whether ‘the eye of God’ was interpreted as loving or critical, architecture concretized the Quaker’s notion of inevitable judgment by an omnipresent God. The entire complex was laid out to carry religious meanings and messages for the inmates.

In addition to conveying a message to the prisoners, architecture was also used to induce the Christian ideology to the general public. The eleven-acre Eastern State Penitentiary compound was enclosed by highly secured stone walls. This exterior façade, along with the watchtower, was embellished in a commanding Gothic style that resembled the medieval castles [figure 5]. Although the exterior wall serves no actual function in the rehabilitation of the prisoners, its high cost of construction was justified by its role as a reminder for the society of the consequences of crime. In the book Forms of Constraint, Norman Johnston wrote,

“Prisons in the nineteenth century were not intended solely to be places to punish and reform wrongdoers. They were also tangible symbols calculated to remind free citizens what might befall them should they break the law. The exterior design, therefore, had a psychological as well as physical function: to deter the potential criminal.”[v]

Architecture, thus, became a tool to maintain order both within and without the prison. It took on forms, styles and materials specific to the penal philosophy of the time. It was the medium that enabled the Quakers to transform the history of penology in America.

The Eastern State Penitentiary was completed in 1829 at the enormous cost of $772,600 and operated for 142 years, until 1971. It was a popular attraction for visitors around the world, but it quickly lost its appeal when critics began to question the effectiveness of solitary confinement. One of the most influential opponents of the Pennsylvania System was Charles Dickens, who wrote in his American Notes, “The System is rigid, strict and hopeless…and I believe it to be cruel and wrong…I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”[vi]  The negative impact that solitary isolation had on prisoners’ mental health was seen by many critics as even more cruel than the physical flogging the Quakers had been so desperate to abandon. The number of insanity cases continued to rise within the Eastern State Penitentiary. Although the official physician claimed that such prisoners had already shown symptoms of madness when they were admitted, skepticism continued to grow. In the 1870 National Prison Congress conference in Cincinnati, the goal of prison discipline was declared to be “the reformation of criminals, not the infliction of vindictive suffering.”[vii]  By 1913, solitary confinement was finally discarded in Philadelphia as criticism intensified and religious perspective began to lose ground to a more scientific attitude toward human behavior.

The trend for a more humane approach towards inmates resulted from a shift in the understanding behind the psychology of crime. Prior to the twentieth century, the assumption behind criminology was that all people were rational and logical; their primary goals in life were to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. This classical view translated to a penology that was more concerned with the formalization of punishment than it was with understanding the motivation behind the offender’s action. Consequently, punishment was enforced regardless of the offender’s crime, age, sex or mental capacity. However, increased opposition against this classical view emerged during the late nineteenth century among the determinists, who believed that human behavior was the product of many environmental and social factors. Following the concept of  the “born criminal” promulgated by psychiatrist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso, they believed that criminals should be organized into different categories such as insane criminals, criminals of passion, and occasional criminals so that their rehabilitation could be more individualized.

Derived from this mode of thinking was a group of “new-generation” prisons constructed between the 1950s and the 1970s. These second-generation prisons differed radically from the Pennsylvania System in that they transmuted the idea of rehabilitation from religious enlightenment to “ways of helping inmates to change and improve as a result of their own efforts.”[viii] Discipline was reinforced by a system of both incentives and withholding of privileges. Instead of giving inmates a bible in an eremite environment, the new-generation prisons gave inmates the opportunity to make small manufactured goods, such as license plates and baskets, in a group setting. The idea was to instill a work ethic in the offenders, in hopes that it would ease their transition when they returned to the labor force. To facilitate this, dayrooms and classrooms were incorporated into the prisons’ design. Rather than organizing the cells around a single watchtower, a unit management method was employed and cells were grouped into “pods” for different categories of criminals [figure 6]. Each pod contained twelve to twenty-four cells and was connected to other pods through a long corridor that linked the housing cells to other facilities such as a dinning hall and dayroom. This subdivision method aimed to deinstitutionalize and reduce the scale of the penal system in order to create a more ‘normal’ environment for the inmates.

Beside the changes in the design layout, a significant difference in the second-generation prison was its use of technology as the primary means for maintaining security. This transformation, while largely caused by the advent of new invention, was actually a response to an increasing safety concern for the employees. After a series of tragic prison riots, most notably at Attica Prison in 1971, which left twenty-eight prisoners and nine guards dead, prison architects were instructed to create barriers between the inmates and the staff. As a result, many prisons were monitored using remote surveillance technology, and access to each part of the structure was controlled from a centralized command room.  Security glazing replaced steel bars around the dayroom to improve staff’s visibility from a distance. These techniques minimized direct contact between the inmates and the employees. It was only when the prisoners needed to be escorted to another part of the building that they would come in contact with the staffs. Thus the architecture allowed the staff to take a more passive role by responding to problems rather than preventing them.

The second-generation prison was initially well received by both the public and the employees because it was a significant improvement over the first generation prisons. They were duplicated throughout the United State in an effort to relieve situation of overcrowding in many first-generation prisons. In the twenty-year period from 1950 to 1970, ninety-seven prisons were constructed at a cost of 2.1 billion dollars.[ix] These prisons were not only very costly to construct because of the necessary technological hardware, they were also very expensive to operate due to the large number of staff required for escorting the inmates between activities. As the incarcerated population grew rapidly during the 1980s (resulting from tougher criminal legislation) the public began to express resentment about the large amount of resources devoted to housing outlaws when the money could better serve the educational, welfare and health care system. Statistics showed that it cost an average of $25,000 a year to house an inmate in 1988.[x]  In addition to financial concerns, the Bureau of Prisons also faced difficulties in locating sites for new facilities because of the growing opposition from the public regarding prison construction in their neighborhood. At the same time, human rights advocates, such as the Amnesty International, continued to push for a healthier environment that would be more similar to ‘normal’ living conditions. This meant having natural light, climate control, television and other amenities traditionally denied to the inmates. Faced with these demands, the architect of the 1990s was challenged to create an economically efficient design that was both well-received by the public and humane to the prisoners.

The solution was a group of third-generation prisons that are typically located in large complexes sited in remote areas [figure 7]. These complexes, known as Federal Correctional Complexes, are like small cities, each containing several facilities of different security levels within its walls. Their remote location not only freed up valuable real estate in the city, but also alleviated the public’s concern for safety. Moreover, by grouping the prisons together in one complex, planners were able to share many amenities, such as roads, an exercise yard and a central command center, which would have cost many times more if constructed separately for each facility. 

Most complexes have low and medium-level security facilities, but some also include super maximum-level security prisons. In the low-level security facility, the architecture contains the fewest barriers between the inmates. They are housed in dormitory accommodations with access to most of the building. In the medium-level or “normal” security facility, fifty to sixty individual cells measuring about seventy square feet each are grouped into pods, but they are different from the second-generation prisons in that each pod contains its own dayroom and classrooms. The cells are organized into a two-story triangular shaped pod with the dayroom in the middle [figure 8]. The inmates work, have recreation and receive treatments all within the pod.  Instead of going to the dining hall, prisoners have meals that are delivered to the dayroom of each pod for reheating. Since all activities can occur in each pod, the number of staff required to escort the inmates decreases and thus reduces the cost of operation.

Furthermore, rather than using remote surveillance monitors, each pod in the third-generation prison is managed by an officer who has minute-to-minute interaction with the prisoners. This operational method not only lessens the construction cost of the building by cutting back on the security hardware, it also enables a more personal relationship to be developed between the officer and the prisoners – a more favorable environment for the prisoner’s rehabilitation according to the human rights’ advocates. Plumbing fixtures are relocated from each cell to a cluster of centralized bathrooms and shower rooms within the pod. This allows for a more normative and sanitary living condition while abating the enormous cost of installing and maintaining plumbing pipes in each cell.

Natural light and color also play a more important role in these new prison designs. Since the building is now located within a large complex with secure walls on its perimeter, each cell can have a fixed window of a minimum of six square feet on the exterior façade of the building, bringing ample natural light into the cells [figure 9]. Skylights are installed to light the dayroom and the corridors.  The security provided by the perimeter wall of the complex also frees the prison from massive masonry wall construction. Prefabricated cells are now assembled on site, accelerating the construction schedule and diminishing the cost [figure 10]. The interiors of the prisons are painted with warm, muted and contrasting colors and decorated with natural plants. Furnishing has been switched from institutional grade to one with a softer finish, for example the traditional high-security stainless steel plumbing fixtures are replaced with cheaper porcelain toilets and sinks. Metal doors with steel bars typically used for cells are replaced by solid wood doors with secure glass windows. The aim of these design changes is to create a gentle environment that looks and feels as normal as possible, thus decreasing the stress on the inmates and creating a more effective condition for their rehabilitation.

A completely different approach is taken in the design of super maximum-level security, also known as Supermax.  Prisoners in these prisons are held in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day with one hour of exercise under strict supervision. These prisons are planned for “the worst of the worst,” criminals who are considered too violent to be housed with the general population. The Supermax is highly dependent on sophisticated security technology. Each cell is monitored by a surveillance camera and all doors in the prisons are controlled electronically. The building is surrounded by a secure fence laced with sensor wire that links to high intensity light, armed patrol car and computer touch screen at the central command center.

Although the use of solitary confinement is a recycled idea from the Quakers, its modern interpretation differs considerably from the first-generation prison. Instead of being a corrective measure, it is used purely because it is a cost-effective way to handle these criminals. By isolating these inmates from the rest of the incarcerated population, the expense of technological secure hardware can be limited, and since solitary confinement constrains the movement of the prisoners, less staff and consequently less operational expenditure is required. While it is understood that these prisoners can benefit from rehabilitative program such as those offered to the medium-level security inmates, it is not financially feasible because of the additional manpower needed for such services. Not only would the Bureau of Prisons need to hire more social workers, but they would need to employ more operational staff and correctional officers to escort and separate the prisoners – this proves to be especially difficult while there is already a shortage of officers. As a result, the only amenity the inmates can have is natural light.  Today, a secure glass window located high on the wall takes the place of the Quaker’s skylight, and hollow metal doors replace the iron bar gate, but these architectural improvements have not stopped the mental abuse caused by these living conditions.

Today prison reform groups continue to criticize the practice of solitary confinement. They also question the lack of criteria for placing offenders into these Supermax prisons.  In a report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Human Rights Watch and the International Human rights Law Group, Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote,

“Prison authorities have near-complete discretion to assign any inmate to super-maximum security housing on the flimsiest of suspicions, with no due-process for the inmates assigned and no independent oversight or judicial review. Many prisoners report to human rights organizations that they were remanded to maxi-maxi housing units on trumped-up charges of gang affiliation in retaliation for filing complaints, providing jailhouse lawyer services, or simply to coerce information from them about other prisoners.”[xi]

Many offenders were wrongly placed in Supermax facilities for merely being verbally hostile to guards or for refusing to follow orders. While ninety-seven percent of them will eventually be released either directly or through a lower security level prison, Dr. Haney concluded that the Supermax environment “can be psychologically destructive for anyone who endures it for a significant period of time.”[xii]  Some of the Supermax inmates forget how to organize their lives or how to initiate behavior after living under such  structured routines. Some lose their ability to concentrate and have their mind racing. In other words, many of them will be unable to function normally upon their release. This not only places a burden on the welfare system, it also causes high recidivism rate, which in turn aggravates the overcrowding problem in our prison system. 

While this cyclical course cannot be broken solely by architecture, there is no doubt that physical environment plays a significant role in the lives of the prisoners because it governs their activities and set boundaries of their movement. Since the beginning of prison reform in the eighteenth century, the objective of the penal system has been the rehabilitation of prisoners, and architecture has been one means by which achieve this goal. Although the objective of the penal system has not changed over time, the design of prisons has changed significantly as a result of the shifting penal philosophy.  Working with the Quaker’s belief that self-reflection was the way for rehabilitation, the panopticon model was adapted to create an isolated environment where the inmates felt they were constantly being watched. When concern of the safety of the staffs and the humaneness of the prisoners’ treatment rose during the early twentieth century, the layout of the prisons broke up into smaller unit of pods for better security control. In addition, common areas were introduced to encourage interaction amongst the prisoners. The design of prisons continued to change during the latter-half of the twentieth center when adjustments were needed to response to the budgetary constraint and mounting pressures from humanitarian groups and prison complexes in remote areas became the model for today.

Even though it is too early to evaluate the effectiveness of these new third-generation prisons, it is certain that they will continue to evolve as the values, ideals and beliefs of our society changes. In the future, a push for even more normative environment can be foreseen in prison design. The current lack of interest in the career of correctional officers will also exert pressure on the architects to rethink ways to resolve the security issues associated with high inmates-to-staff ratio.  New materials and technology will continue to be incorporated into the overall scheme. No matter how prison design changes, it is important to note that merely providing a physical environment conducive to rehabilitation does not necessarily ensure its occurrence. Architecture can promote positive behavior by creating a less stressful environment and facilitating rehabilitation activities, but it cannot change one’s will. A combination of humane environment, effective management procedure, thoughtful criminal policies and responsive social administration are needed for the success of the prisoners’ rehabilitation. 

[i] Data based on 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994 provided by Bureau of Justice Statistics: Criminal Offenders Statistics. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#recidivism. 2005
[ii] Haney, Craig and Lynch, Mona. Regulating Prisons of the Future: A Psychological Analysis of Supermax and Solitary Confinement. New York: New York University Review of Law and Social Change 23. 1997. 477-570.
[iii] Benthan, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings. New York: Verso. 1995.
[iv] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish - The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
[v] Johnston, Norman. Forms of Constraint: A history of Prison Architecture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2000. 36.
[vi] Dickens, Charles. American Notes. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1851. Ch. VII.
[vii] Sifakis, Carl. The Encyclopedia of American Prisons. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2003. x.
[viii] Spens, Iona. Architecture of Incarceration. London: Academy Editions. 1994. 25.
[ix] Bureau of Prisons. http://www.bop.gov/about/history/closed.jsp
[x] Spens, Iona. Architecture of Incarceration. London: Academy Editions. 1994.  27.
[xi] http://www.spunk.org/texts/prison/sp001611.txt
[xii] Ibid.