Designing Prisons with Humans in Mind

Can a shiny new prison with floor-to-ceiling windows and private inmate balconies reduce recidivism? Would it fly with the public? A new prison in Leoben, Austria, is searching for these answers – and in the meantime taking a bold step in architecture and corrections policy.

Jim Lewis profiled the prison's architect, Josef Hohensinn, in a fascinating New York Times Magazine piece last week, and through an exploration of design he found some interesting truths about prison policy. An important piece of prison reform lies in architecture, because you can’t end the warehousing of human lives if prisons still look and feel like warehouses.

At the heart of Hohensinn’s vision for the building are some forward-thinking ideas about human interaction, crime and space. Carved on the concrete wall around the perimeter is a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the United States signed and ratified) that reads: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” (It's sad to consider that forward-thinking, but I think it's fair to say in this country)

Lewis writes:

I asked Hohensinn what he would do if, contrary to fact, it were conclusively proved that prisons like his encouraged crime rather than diminished it. Would he renounce the design? He shook his head. “The prisoners’ dignity is all I really care about,” he told me.

I think he’s really saying that he doesn’t believe anyone would commit crime knowing they would be deprived of their freedom. But statements like that might fly in the prison-happy US of A. Maybe Leoben and Hohensinn are too far over the cutting edge for us. The prison is only four years old, too soon to tell if it reduces recidivism. With a 70% recidivism rate in the U.S., however, we should be ready to try anything, and maybe we are. Some of the most revealing comments in Davis’ piece came from those in charge of American prisons. Perhaps this recession, this political climate and the increased awareness of our overflowing prisons are finally having an impact.

No institutional architecture can be expected to consistently manifest the clarity and elegance of Hohensinn’s design.

More to the point, it’s unlikely that anything even remotely like it will be built in this country anytime soon. John Baldwin, the director of the Iowa Department of Corrections, looked at pictures of the Leoben design and, like many people, found it both intriguing and a bit much. “We’re more focused on putting our money into mental-health and re-entry treatment units,” he told me. “I didn’t see a great deal of treatment space, or the kind of classroom space where you can teach job skills. Nice views, great basketball court, but I didn’t think Iowans want to put their money into that sort of thing.

“Still,” he said with atypical enthusiasm, “architecture is huge.” Iowa is in the process of building new facilities for both men and women. To that end, the state held a design competition and received 17 entries. While the winning submissions are not as luxurious as the Leoben prison, they do share certain principles: a smaller number of cells in each unit, more sunlight, security made deliberately unobtrusive. Other states may soon be joining Iowa, if not because they want to then because they have to. Earlier this year, federal judges in California tentatively ruled that the state release almost a third of its prisoners because the conditions in which they’re kept amount to cruel and unusual punishment. If the ruling holds up on appeal, it’s quite likely that other states will face similar sanctions. And then what?