A fascinating view of a different approach to prison architecture

This morning’s New York Times includes this must-read article from the magazine section.  The piece is headlined “Behind Bars … Sort Of,” and it is focused on prison near the Austrian town of Leoben that is “a sleek structure made of glass, wood and concrete, stately but agile, sure in its rhythms and proportions: each part bears an obvious relationship to the whole. In the daytime, the corridors and rooms are flooded with sunshine. At night, the whole structure glows from within.”  As the pictures in this slideshow highlight, the facility looks more like an Ikea store than a prison.  The article does a great job discussing not only the architecture of places in which people are imprisoned, but also the relationship between prison construction and crime rates and a bunch of other important punishment topics.

There are too many great passages in this article to quote them all, but he is a sample of just some of the interesting insights in this terrifically thought-provoking piece:

It sounds odd to say, but it’s nonetheless true: we punish people with architecture.  The building is the method.  We put criminals in a locked room, inside a locked structure, and we leave them there for a specified period of time.

It wasn’t always so.  Prison is an invention, and a fairly recent one at that: it wasn’t until the 18th century that incarceration became our primary form of punishment.  True, there have been dungeons and the like for quite some time, but they were generally for traitors and political enemies and, later, debtors.  More common criminals could expect other forms of penalty: execution, for example, and various kinds of corporal punishment; forced labor and conscription; public humiliation; the levying of fines; exile; loss of privileges and offices; and so on. We’ve come to consider most of these barbaric, unjust or wildly impractical, but their very existence should tend against the idea that settling with criminals by putting them in a building is a natural thing to do.

To be sure, there’s something about prisons that engages man’s imagination.  Alberti discussed them, Piranesi drew them, Jeremy Bentham proposed them.  But the imagination of incarceration rarely translates directly into design. Bentham’s Panopticon, a circular structure with an all-seeing guardhouse in the middle, was meant to show that surveillance was as powerful a method of control as shackles and door locks — an idea that has proved enticing to many an academic, though it was never built….

Does imprisonment work?  It seems like a bottom-line question, but the answer depends on what you want prisons to do, and that’s not an easy thing to decide.  Even if we assume that there are good and sensible reasons to incarcerate people, there remains some debate about what purpose is served.  Deterrence is often proposed as a goal, but no one really knows whether the prospect of incarceration gives would-be criminals pause, and in any case we quickly reach the realm of diminishing returns….

In fact, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, we mainly use prisons as storage containers, putting people there with the hope that, if nothing else, five years behind bars means five years during which they can’t commit more crimes. It’s called warehousing, and we do a lot of it….

[P]rominent architects aren’t lining up to take on the task of making prisons better.  Most ]architects] would be happy to design a courthouse, but few are quite as eager to build a penitentiary, though the two are merely opposite ends of a single system.  New prison construction is generally parceled out to a handful of large and more-or-less anonymous firms — a process that discourages innovation.  Whoever gets the commission is told how many beds are needed, what kinds of security, how much room for the clinic, the recreation area, the guardhouses.  They’re big-box prisons, as anonymous and uninflected as so many Wal-Marts.