PRISON ARCHITECT DESIGN TRIAL
PRISON ARCHITECT DESIGN WINDOWS

An architect's position in the prison-industrial complex becomes more like the engineer who designs the guidance system for missiles. It's one thing to design a living space that is merely boring, quite another to design a living space that causes psychological damage. If the design of a space causes harm, then the architect's responsibility includes not just functional or aesthetic considerations, but ethical ones as well. But into the mix we now see the architect's role being re-considered. The usual players show up in the current discourse about solitary confinement: prisoners, activists, psychologists, politicians, and representatives of the prison industry. вЂњSo almost total alienation from natural light and nature, and total isolation from other humans are built into the architectural design.вЂќ

PRISON ARCHITECT DESIGN WINDOWS

вЂњAt Pelican Bay State Prison, where the current hunger strike originated, there are no windows in the cells and the only place prisoners can look out from their cells through small pinholes in their metal doors is a blank wall across the walkway,вЂќ Kupers writes in an e-mail. His Oakland-based colleague, Terry Kupers - who teaches at the Wright Institute in Berkeley - says there's a consensus that solitary confinement harms mentally ill inmates, and that evidence suggests the environment at the Pelican Bay SHU impairs relatively stable inmates, as well. The toxicity to which Grassian refers derives from the space itself - from the fact that it has no windows, and affords little to no contact with other living things. The вЂњtoxicity of solitary confinementвЂќ is strong enough to induce psychosis in normal humans, he concludes in an article for the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy. Ex-prisoner Danny Murillo felt a swell of anxiety when visiting his father in the hospital because the long, white hallways reminded him of security housing.Д«ut research suggests that security housing units produce harmful effects, which are often so potent that psychologists coined a new term to describe them: вЂњsecurity housing unit syndrome.вЂќ Former Harvard Medical School faculty member Stuart Grassian began using the term after evaluating 200 prisoners in various state and federal penitentiaries, and concluding that the ones locked in solitary exhibited вЂњacute mental illness.вЂќ In some cases, they suffered pre-existing illnesses that were amplified after periods of prolonged isolation in others, he says, they'd previously been healthy. Steven Czifra, who spent nearly half his life in solitary confinement, says he now gets panic attacks when faced with big crowds or large rooms. Psychologists who study its effects say that sitting alone for prolonged periods can lead to insomnia, memory loss, and hallucinations.ДЇormer prisoners who've tried to re-acclimate to the real world say they're often paralyzed by flashbacks. The list of demands varies, but there's a common thread: Isolation is a form of excessively cruel punishment, strikers argue, not because it involves any kind of physical abuse or deprivation rather, it's an ineffable form of torture, the kind that accrues gradually, over long periods of time. They've maintained a set of demands that range from the concrete (provide nutritious food, allow prisoners to make phone calls), to the abstract (вЂњensure that prisoners have regular, meaningful contact,вЂќ says one bullet point on a Prisoner Hunger Strike page). Most of the original strikers have given up, but a few hold-outs remain. As his pale, brooding face graced newspaper broadsides, Sell became an unsettling specter in a large and acrimonious debate.ДЄt that point, the Pelican Bay hunger strike had just entered its third week it's now into its seventh.

PRISON ARCHITECT DESIGN TRIAL

But activists insist that Sell died of starvation, that he had joined 32,000 other prisoners to protest the harsh conditions in California's four security housing units, including the one in California State Prison, Corcoran, where he sat awaiting trial for murdering a cell mate. After conducting an autopsy, the Kings County coroner's office ruled that 32-year-old Sell had hanged himself. He'd been deemed too dangerous to interact with other inmates and had been confined in what's called a вЂњsecurity housing unit,вЂќ or SHU, when he was found dead. He'd earned a double life sentence for attempted first-degree murder. Design by Audrey Fukuman.Д«illy Sell was not, by any means, a sympathetic character. Photograph and direction by Mike Koozmin.

Prison architect design