His idea that the resources devoted to imprisonment should go instead to “justice reinvestment”-medical and social services, housing, and education-may seem utopian, but the belief is widespread among reformers that the prisoner population expands to fill the cells available. “The problem of mass incarceration is a policy problem-it’s not at its root a design problem,” Sperry insists.
At one end of the spectrum is Raphael Sperry, the president of the San Francisco–based Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, who has long advocated that architects should boycott prison design altogether.
The moment, says Stanley Richards, a former inmate of New York City’s notorious Rikers Island and now executive vice president of the prisoner-advocacy group Fortune Society, presents “a historic opportunity” to rethink America’s prison system, comprising more than 1,800 federal and state prisons, 3,163 jails (housing short-stay inmates and those awaiting trial or sentencing), and 1,852 juvenile facilities-in some cases from the ground up.Īrchitects are responding to this challenge in a variety of ways. “Almost a third of the people admitted to jail are released within four days, suggesting that many should not have been jailed at all,” Lippman wrote. Parallel efforts are under way in many states, including New York, where a report by a commission headed by former chief judge Jonathan Lippman has recommended reforms, including as a “top priority” ending cash bail. But the law only benefits people convicted of federal crimes 90 percent of American prisoners are held in state prisons and local jails. even imprisons black men at a higher rate than South Africa did under apartheid.īut the number of Americans in jails and prisons-around 2.2 million-is now at a 20-year low and still falling, as crime declines and the FIRST STEP Act, signed by President Trump in December, has cracked open the door to parole for victims of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed in the 1990s. By that standard, the justice system of the United States, with more people behind bars than any other country in the world, doesn’t even measure up to the society under which Mandela lived, which in 1993 locked up its citizens at a rate of 368 per 100,000, compared to 655 in the U.S. "No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails,” Nelson Mandela once said-and who should know better?-except perhaps Dostoevsky, who said the same thing a century earlier.
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