A paper on reforming the prison industrial complex through architecture:
Subject:
The subject of my paper will be prison architecture (correctional facilities, and detention centers) in America. I will explore the issues that exist within it and where those issues stem from.
This subject is important to explore because the “U.S. provides room and board for 25% of the world’s total prison population, according to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative; that’s 23 million people”. This subject is especially significant to me because the majority of people incarcerated in America are black males, so as a member of a group of Americans subject to this condition I feel that it makes sense for me to take advantage of my education and position as a student of architecture to try and better understand how architecture can be used to better improve the conditions of inmates.
Question:
My primary research questions are as follows: Has architecture been considered as a tool to improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation inmates, and if not then why?
Can architecture be used as a tool to improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation of inmates, rather than something that creates and promotes the punishment of the individual, while still allowing correctional officers to maintain some sense of order and control?
Method:
First, I will analyze the relationship between space and the mental well-being of a person. I will discuss basic human needs as identified by scholarly articles, books, and essays. This includes things like exposure to light, being outdoors, and generally being allowed to have some sense of comfort. During this section, at least one source I will pull information from is the Stanford Prison Experiment. I plan to show what the effects of prison-like conditions can do to every day civilians thrown into a scenario in which they are made to behave as the individuals who occupy that kind of space (prison guards and inmates).
Then, I will outline and discuss the purpose of sending a person to prison. I will research the idea behind sending someone to a penal institution, and what the outcome of that process is supposed to be. I will look at statistics regarding recidivism rates of prisons throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. “Figures from a 2016 U.S. Sentencing Commission study show America’s recidivism rates as the highest in the world, at about 60 percent.”
This will lead to a brief discussion on whether or not I believe different degrees of criminal behavior warrant different types of prison conditions, those conditions being the ones that will be outlined in the next section of the paper. In this section I will also discuss why I believe that although people are incarcerated for a reason, it does not mean that they deserve to be cramped into prisons in which they are essentially treated as less than human.
This will provide me with the opportunity to talk about the private prison industry, and why conditions are usually as bad as they are. I will discuss why it is so difficult to create change in an industry that is so tangled inside of the capitalistic interests of CEOS of the companies that have stakes within this industry.
Source:
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/is-there-such-a-thing-as-good-prison-design
Gene 