You link to an atricle on some of the worst prison designs and that article states, regarding the Oklahoma County Detention Center in Oklahoma City, "One of the chief issues is the fact that the facility is 13 stories in height, which makes it very difficult and labor-intensive to move inmates around the building, since they need to rely on series of elevators."
This concept building has the same issue and no outdoor areas for inmates...
Granted I think we should bring back chain gangs and state that criminals serving time have zero human rights and that hard time is very difficult and labor intensive and abusive as a deterrant to crime... We work them at least 5 days a week and they have the option to either work on the weekends or they can take classes that teach them basic math, literacy, and trades. They wouldn't have time to do drugs, make shives, get in fights, form gangs, etc. They would be exhausted, well behaved, or they would have the snot kicked out of them and they would learn to be well behaved... Upon release they would be skilled and educated... They would also have zero desire to go back.
Design has been used to challenge the current concept of a prison before. In fact, design has separated the prisons that are successful from the ones that aren’t. A new concept from Penn graduate architecture student Greg Knobloch seeks to challenge preconceived notions of what it is to build a prison.
A collaborative project, 499.summit proposes a simple design concept: a prison built for an urban environment.
The structural design contains three towers in the shape of an arch. The arches converge to form Knobloch’s circulatory concept. Within the arches there three phases: incarceration (up), transformation (over), and integration (down). They are isolated at the bottom during the incarceration phase and merge together during the integration phase.
Just the like arches, the inmates are more secluded during this incarceration phase, and when the integration phase happens, the arches merge in their program as well as in their structure.
Public program as well as residential housing units are introduced in the downward side of the integration phase. In other words, the inmate moves throughout the building according to their behavior. The design imagines the inmates graduating through the facility, with inmates slowly exposed to more social interaction in hopes of a smoother reintegration into society.
Would you want one of these in your town? Even if you don’t, it is interesting to think about our ideas of what a prison is supposed to look like, and what design can do to change and better our current systems.
More photos of the renderings:
[Designboom]
Images: Greg Knobloch
