Cityscape
The CorrectionsArchitectural Complex Spending $9 billion on new buildings will not solve the problems of Rikers Island.
The design-based “cure” for New York’s prison problem
new york has finally decided that tossing troubled people into a dungeon, ensuring they come out even more deeply wounded than they went in, shames our nominally civilized city. The warren of cells, pens, yards, and trailers on Rikers Island—“a penal colony in the middle of the East River,” as City Council Speaker Corey Johnson puts it—has been sentenced to close as part of a criminal-justice-system overhaul that aims to halve the jail population by 2026. All of this seems hopeful, hugely expensive, and possibly quixotic.
The city is betting big on architecture. At the heart of the transformation is a plan to distribute detainees among four new highrises close to the courthouses of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. It will take an estimated seven years and nearly $9 billion to rehouse the equivalent of a small college’s student body into secure vertical dorms. That’s more than it will cost to rebuild La Guardia Airport, which serves 30 million passengers a year. These are optimistic uses of the future tense: Before the last ribbon is cut, those estimates will almost certainly be shred
ded by delays, lawsuits, overruns, abuses, and waste. Meanwhile, nobody will want to spend serious money to rehab a doomed facility, and Rikers will decay drastically, likely for more than a decade, doing more damage along the way.
Around the country, law-and-order conservatives have insisted that the most effective way to clamp down on crime, fight drugs, and cope with extreme mental illness is to build more jails. Here, progressive politicians counter that the way to reintegrate detainees into society, cut costs, dismantle the prison-industrial complex, and reap the dividends from lower crime rates is to … build more jails. At the far end of the debate are No New Jails activists, who see incarceration as an instrument of racist oppression: You can’t design a more civilized detention facility, they say, any more than you can bludgeon someone gently.
Maybe newly built, hyperexpensive confinement is the best—or, at any rate, the unavoidable—option. It’s good to see politicians plan for a future that will arrive well after they’ve left office, but we should be skeptical about architecture’s ability to solve social problems on its own. So far, the de Blasio administration’s two-year-old strategy to reduce homelessness with an archipelago of shelters has had no perceptible impact.
Consider the precedent of public housing. In the mid-20th century, the powerful and well-intentioned decreed that the only way to rescue the poor from their squalor was to tear down their neighborhoods and move them to modern, sanitary structures. For a while, it worked, especially in New York, where housing projects were generally sturdy, airy, and safe. It wasn’t long, though, before stinginess and prejudice took hold. Light bulbs went unreplaced, elevators unrepaired, residents unheard. Drug dealers commandeered common areas, police stayed out, and parents kept their children away from open windows lest they be hit by stray bullets. The new solution for desperate poverty was to undo the previous solution: Authorities dynamited the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis in 1972 and more recently demolished Cabrini-Green in Chicago. The same logic held in London, where the council housing estate Robin Hood Gardens has come down. These were failures of funding, politics, and social glue, but architecture was sold as the cure so it got the blame.
For as long as there have been prisons full of abjection and despair, there have been plans to replace them with showcases of decency. London’s ancient house of horrors Newgate Prison (a quick stroll from a courthouse, as New York’s new detention centers will be) had a demonic reputation and was demolished and rebuilt many times, only to revert to misery. When one of those ever more modern iterations opened, it was soon overwhelmed by untreated mental illness. In his book London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd quotes a 19th-century report on conditions at Newgate: “Lunatics ranged up and down the hallways, a terror to all they encountered.” It was definitively demolished at the turn of the 20th century.
Rikers Island too began as an enlightened showcase. In 1886, when conditions (and porous security) in jails like the Tombs horrified reformers, the city was already contemplating “an enormous model penitentiary, ample in size to serve for many years to come … the most perfect prison in the world.” It took nearly 50 years before the offshore, purportedly escape-proof complex opened with a capacity of 2,200. Within seven years, the commissioner of corrections complained that he’d had to cram in 3,000 residents, using machine rooms for the overflow.
Crowding is a recurring theme in the history of correctional design. In New York, the jail population has declined from a peak of about 22,000 in 1991 to 7,000 today, and the goal is to get it to 3,300, which would be the lowest number since 1920. Projecting such a steep drop assumes that the era of falling crime and compassionate corrections will stretch into the distant future. The city hopes to nudge the trend along by spending $391 million on mental-health treatment, “violence interruption,” and various other programs meant to keep people out of jail. Not so fast, respond hardened pessimists: Crime can roar back at any moment, and when it does, we’re going to need somewhere to stash a surging population of criminals.
Then there’s the question of what the city will be getting for its $9 billion. A wellordered jail is not a storage shed for human beings; it’s a place where defendants who have yet to face trial can prepare for their defense, keep busy, stay safe, and get ready for the outside world. Rikers keeps them focused merely on staying alive. There, moving prisoners around is a cumbersome, sometimes dangerous proposition. Every day, corrections officers load groups from Rikers onto buses and transport them to an assortment of courthouses and back. Lawyers need half a day to visit a client. Family members often can’t get there at all.
New jails can ease those transitions. James Krueger, a principal at HMC, the California-based architecture firm, which, with KMD Architects, designed the widely praised Las Colinas Detention & Reentry
Facility in San Diego, says architecture can help flip the ratio of carrots to sticks. His firm designed six levels of security within the same compound. “We want to incentivize good behavior through degrees of freedom,” Krueger says. “You can start out in level three and work your way down to level one, where you can walk to your classes and from one building to another without being escorted.”
Architects frequently and sometimes immodestly beat the drum for the power of design to engineer society and improve lives. One recent trend in hospitals and schools is evidence-based design, which translates data into commonsense techniques. Just the presence of a window improves patients’ health and students’ ability to learn. Old-style concrete-and-steel boxes amplify noise, pummeling detainees with constant, panic-inducing reverberations. New, acoustically softer facilities can give bruised minds a chance to heal—and make it easier for officers to figure out where an anomalous noise is coming from.
Las Colinas, like most of the bright, Scandinavian-style models that reformers promote, spreads out like a suburban high school. New York’s new jails will be towers amid other towers, and getting daylight and fresh air in will be a logistical puzzle. They will also require costly redundancies like superwide stairwells, powerful ventilation systems, extra elevators, and outdoor spaces on almost every floor. “We use a ‘podular’ approach,” says Jeff Goodale, an architect who directs the Justice Group at the large firm HOK and who designed the startlingly airy Maple Street Correctional Center in Redwood City, California. “You have 24 to 64 inmates in a unit, and all the services they need—outdoor recreation, food, counseling, medication—are provided right there. That way, you’re not moving inmates throughout the facility.”
The deeper challenge lies in alleviating a culture of brutality that can defeat any design. Architecture can express empathy; it can’t manufacture it. Goodale is bullish on design’s ability to improve behavior. “A third of the people who are in a facility every day are staff, and they may spend many years working there,” he points out. “If the space they’re in makes them feel less stressed, less burdened, and less overwhelmed, that has a positive impact on how they manage the inmates.” I hope he’s right, but I doubt that any building can force guards to treat their charges with respect if they’re inclined to see them as objects, or dissuade detainees from taking their frustrations out on one another. Eventually, any structure can fail under the weight of hostility and neglect, no matter how much it costs.