TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052592/0525430.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 10.1 KB | 204 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 52

Gilded Cages


New designs for jails and prisons are showing positive results.
The question is, can we afford them?

By MARY CRONIN -- With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Huntsville


    Last New Year's Day, Boston's Sheriff Robert Rufo gave
935 hardened criminals a present: a postmodern pink
concrete-and-brick high-rise home -- a new designer prison, with
a colonnaded inner courtyard where the inmates, clad in bright
orange jackets, could stroll in pairs. Inside, brightly colored
dayrooms equipped with televisions, butcher-block tables and
cushy chairs completed a picture of serenity. For inmates and
their watchers alike, it was a far cry from the dank,
forbidding, Victorian-style Suffolk County House of Correction
they had left behind on the banks of Boston Harbor. Gone were
the five tiers of cages, the earsplitting clash of steel against
steel as hundreds of cell doors slammed shut in unison; gone was
the cavernous, clattering mess hall, whose ambiance was an
invitation to riot. Sheriff Rufo and Boston had just bought into
the new architecture of justice.

    Building jails and prisons is big business these days. It
is the product of both urgent necessity and emerging
philosophy: an exploding population of convicts on the one hand
and, on the other, some new theories on how to treat them. In
the past decade, the war on drugs and tough mandatory-sentencing
laws have helped double the number of inmates, which reached a
record 1.1 million this year. To house and feed this army of
incarcerated souls, states have poured $30 billion into
construction in the past 10 years. This year they will spend $7
billion more, while the Federal Government will plow $2 billion
into a system that is demanding 1,100 new beds every week. After
Medicare, corrections is the fastest-growing item in most state
budgets, eating into scarce funds earmarked for health,
education, transportation and social services.

    Exploiting this dire need for more jail beds, enlightened
corrections officers like Rufo are pushing for "direct
supervision" of prisoners, a concept that requires new
functional designs. These, in turn, have inspired a creative
breed of architects and builders who are capitalizing on the
challenge of building facilities that provide the kinds of
living spaces that officers can properly manage. "Besides
requiring fewer officers to run," argues Rufo, these New Age
facilities "cut down on fights, assaults, vandalism and
workmen's compensation cases. Most important, they take control
of the prison out of the hands of the inmates."

    Modern prison design has been evolving since the late
'60s, when the federal Bureau of Prisons first tried replacing
dangerous linear tiers of steel cages with rectangular modules
of cells built around common rooms manned by officers. The
results were dramatic: violence among inmates and between
inmates and officers decreased. Prisoners no longer controlled
the jails. Some state prisons, wary of exposing guards directly
to inmates, modified the design, positioning guards as observers
in secure booths. The results were less successful: inmates,
still isolated, remained in control. In 1981 California's Contra
Costa County jail was the first county jail to take down all the
barriers between prisoners and officers. Exercise rooms,
traditional furnishings -- even an open booking area without
cells -- were added. The changes relieved stress, reduced
stereotypical behavior by both inmates and officers, and vastly
reduced violence and vandalism. Corrections officials began to
see the concept's full potential. "It is so revolutionary," says
jail architect Jay Farbstein. "After hearing the anecdotal
information, you get a really strong feeling for the power of
the idea and how well it works."

    Boston's Suffolk County House of Correction, like the new
Suffolk County Jail four miles away, is typical of the new
design. Each housing unit is a self-contained triangular pod
consisting of 30 to 60 cells on two floors overlooking a common
room. Prisoners are separated into units according to their
conduct rather than the seriousness of their crimes. Good
behavior is rewarded with advancement through a series of
increasingly privileged units, the highest of which allows
inmates to spend the day in the common room, locked in with only
one or two unarmed officers. Meals are shipped from central
kitchens and served cafeteria style from warming tables in each
pod so that prisoners never congregate in overwhelming numbers.
Key to the success of the concept is the interaction between
inmates and "officers," new prisonspeak for guards.

    Rufo fumes when he hears the new environs derided as
"glamour slammers," as they are by critics who argue that it is
politically unwise to make convicts so comfortable. Explains
Denver-based criminal-justice consultant Ray Nelson: "Carpeting
on the floors, ceramic rather than steel toilets, coordinated
uniforms, wooden cell doors are all cost-effective. Besides,
amenities send a message of expectation of behavior, a message
that works." Included in the concept is another reversal of
conventional wisdom: a stretch in jail may actually
rehabilitate. So convinced is Rufo that literacy training can
reduce recidivism that he shepherded a law through the
Massachusetts legislature last year requiring functionally
illiterate county prisoners to take basic reading courses before
becoming eligible for parole. Proceeds from the jailhouse
commissary help pay the cost of teachers and supplies. And
because part of the direct-supervision model is to normalize the
environment, space is reserved for recreation, specialty-group
meetings such as Alcoholics Anonymous or drug-therapy sessions,
and religious functions. Says Rufo: "We have to let people have
time to study, pray and let off steam, which is why the dayroom
is valuable."

    In Texas, where the inmate population doubled in the past
dozen years and voters last year approved a $1.1 billion bond
issue to build 24 new state prisons, hard-line corrections
officials want to see more proof that the new concept is
effective. Seven months ago, Tarrant County moved 1,440
maximum-security inmates from three old, overcrowded facilities
into its newly built Tarrant County Correction Center in Fort
Worth, the first fully functioning direct-supervision jail
system in the state; it features sunny single cells with
windows, no bars. "Since then," says the center's newly
appointed warden, Major James Skidmore, "we have not had one
piece of graffiti written on the walls, one toilet stopped up,
one officer or inmate struck or injured. Our officer turnover
rate has dropped to 5.4% from 18% in our linear jails, where on
average an officer is injured once a day and costly compensation
cases come up once a month. Having budgeted $20,000 for
jailhouse repairs for the first year, so far we have spent $50
for two panes of broken glass.

    "It is a matter of addressing human needs," Skidmore
maintains. Savings on heavy-security construction went to larger
single cells, multipurpose rooms, classrooms equipped with
computers. Because not enough veteran officers in the system
were willing to work in the new jail, Skidmore enlisted 95 new
hires from the area and put them through 160 hours of training.
"After six months on the job," he says, "seeing an inmate who
messes up, my officers think they have failed." Direct
supervision is a giant step for Texas, where sheriffs as a rule
act tough and dip snuff. The touchy-feely character of direct
supervision may rub them the wrong way. But what is forcing them
to take Tarrant County seriously is its cost-efficiency and the
mounting evidence that inmates are better managed. With
overcrowding the most pressing problem in Texas jails, followed
by a shortage of funds, most counties are scrambling to build
quick, cheap housing. Only two small direct-supervision
facilities are planned at this stage, but Skidmore says word is
getting around the community that he's running a winner.

    Nationally, big-city jailers, their hands already full
controlling pretrial detainees and short-term prisoners in
overcrowded conditions, tend to resist such reforms. They want
more proof that the new designs are truly more efficient and
that their guards will be safe. Proponents counter that with
proper screening, violent prisoners, who account for only 10%
of inmates, can be isolated in highly secure areas, while the
general population could dwell in less expensive -- and
relatively normal -- environments.

    Trouble is, the country's penal system is already moving
toward increased compartmentalization, creating separate
drug-treatment facilities, boot camps for young offenders,
women's prisons complete with secure apartments in which
children can live with their mothers. Some see in the longer
mandatory sentences handed out these days a need for special
accommodations in prisons for the elderly and sick who require
therapy, medication, wider cell doors for wheelchairs, even
Braille signs on doors.

    Direct-supervision management as it is practiced, say
converts, can save almost 40% in construction and equipment
costs and nearly 30% in operations, at least for the basic
facility. In the past few years, 93 such jails and prisons have
come on-line, and 60 others are either under construction or
planned. But the benefactors of this public largesse -- the
architects, builders and contractors, as well as merchants and
job seekers in countless rural towns that are actively looking
to new prisons as a vehicle for economic rebirth -- may be
inadvertently driving the costs beyond a level American society
as a whole can afford.

    Ultimately, new jail and prison designs aren't going to
solve the nation's crime problem. Though humane treatment in
newly designed facilities is valuable, it is not a substitute
for improved management of coherent housing, education, health
and welfare strategies that "rehabilitate" potential criminals
before they go to jail in the first place.