Prison Design Boycott
A month or two ago the architectural think-tank known as ArchVoices, proposed a boycott on prison design. The proposal met with various responses from design professionals around the country. My gut reaction to this call for a boycott was mistrust. The authors of the boycott cited the massive prison population in the U.S. as a reason for the boycott. Of course you need only watch the news for a day to see what happens when people are rotated out of the prison population and back into society... It happens in Florida almost weekly as persons on parole end up as the target of a child murder investigation or something worse.
The problem, of course is that people can't seem to not break the law. It's not like the police are out there rounding up political prisoners. People aren't being incarcerated for crimes they haven't committed. We do not have outrageously jailable offenses in this country... so what's the real problem? Why do people keep breaking the law?
That's the question we should all be asking. Why this happens and how can we prevent it. I've attached my official response to the boycott below.
Instead of jumping right into the fray the moment the boycott was announced, I decided to wait and see how the inevitable argument was framed. Sadly, when there is a problem to be solved in the United States, it immediately becomes a power issue in itself. Two opposing viewpoints emerge and everyone rushes to one side or the other to fight it out. The argument here has quickly become about the social responsibility of the architect.
Certainly architects have a social responsibility; we can certainly influence social trends and political matters. The real question is, “how is this actually done?” Archvoices’s call for a boycott of prison design takes a step out of architecture and into the world of activism and politics, something best left to the sort of people one already finds lurking in such places. More importantly, you are asking architects to solve a problem by not solving the problem. Indeed, architects face the issues of their societies on a daily basis, however, they face these issues as problem solvers. They CREATE solutions; they DESIGN a better home for their society. Asking an architect to solve a problem by doing nothing is counterintuitive. The prison population problems, the problems of recidivism, are not going away simply because we refuse to do anything. As numerous people have pointed out, doing nothing is more than likely the cause of many of our societal problems in the United States.
More often than not, activism in this country takes the form of being against something. Rarely does one see the mob rally behind an actual solution. A call for innovative solutions to prison design (or solutions to the factors that effect future prison populations) would have been more inspiring rather than asking a group of intelligent and creative people to buck all their talents, passions, and instincts to become slacker-activists who demand that someone, somewhere, with real power, provide a solution to a problem they should be solving.
The problem isn’t a political one so, why should the solution be? We, as a design community, must acknowledge that the last 40 years of public design has failed. The schools, the community centers, the churches, the police stations, the government offices, and courthouses… and yes, the prisons are failing in their tasks to better American society. The prison population has increased, and people can’t stay out of prison once they’ve paid their debt. Why? And then, HOW do we respond… as architects and design professionals?
We talk about our “power” to evoke change… but a boycott is a tactic of the powerless. If we have a real voice in society, I suggest we use it constructively. Put some ideas on the table, this IS what our clients pay us for, right? I have more respect for someone willing to actually tackle the prison design problem and propose some solutions rather than simply turning their back on the problem and delegating more of our responsibilities to politicians.
