Dublin_PrisonThe American prison system rarely generates an optimistic conversation. We incarcerate more of our people than any other country in the world, generally with lengthier sentences, even for nonviolent crimes. In California, the overcrowding became so severe that last year our Supreme Court determined that the 8th Amendment rights of its prisoners had been violated and ordered the state to release or relocate thousands of prisoners. At best, our country’s prison system is a global embarrassment; at worst, it is a remorseless testament to a punitive rather than rehabilitative culture that speaks volumes about ugly American values.

As debt-stricken states scramble to reallocate their limited resources, bipartisan coalitions have successfully begun to pass laws and policies that are finally decreasing spending on corrections, as well as the number of people behind bars. As these unlikely alliances have formed, the debate about whether or not a financially motivated shift toward decreasing our prison population will be meaningful after our economy recovers rages on, with some advocates arguing that lasting change will only happen when we have a larger conversation about our racially-biased laws and policies rather than money.

In the meantime, the fact remains that in 2011 the state prison population decreased for the third year in a row, and with that incremental decrease comes unusual real estate: empty prisons. A new report from The Sentencing Project discusses how this decrease happened, and how many states are now left to contend with these vacant facilities. The report notes that thirteen different states have closed prisons or are considering the possibility, with Florida closing an impressive total of 10 correctional facilities in 2012. While some states have already made plans to sell these buildings to the federal Bureau of Prisons to be filled once again, others are exploring surprising alternatives — including museums, science centers, and wildlife sanctuaries. In the otherwise bleak landscape of our criminal justice system, these empty prisons could be an atypical source of hope and reclamation.

But if we choose to repurpose these monstrous buildings, do we risk romanticizing or diminishing a horrific part of American culture – one that is hardly a thing of the past? It’s an important question to ask before we dare embark on any ambitious architecture or interior design odysseys. To simply bulldoze the buildings and wipe the landscape clean seems equally problematic. As Emily Badger asks in her piece on the subject: “If we just raze the empty buildings, would that be tantamount to behaving as if we’d never made [the] mistake [of building them] in the first place?”

Whether or not the idea that mass incarceration “defines us as a society” is easy to swallow, to deny it would be to ignore the facts and to turn a blind eye to our history.  As civil rights attorney and scholar Michelle Alexander has argued, the laws and policies that inform our criminal justice system are an insidious extension of our slavery-era racial caste system and Jim Crow laws. Given the decades it has taken for prison reform to gain even moderate mainstream attention, to quickly move to destroy the spaces we’ve used to warehouse our own citizens (or to turn them into glossy cultural centers) seems dangerous. We’ve all heard the old adage about history repeating itself. In this case, it’s not even history yet — it’s a movement toward change that is brewing in state legislatures, still in its delicate infancy. Perhaps instead of brashly forging ahead with redesign or demolition, we should work to draw attention to these buildings as they stand. They are perhaps the most visceral, publicly accessible representation of mass incarceration we have at our disposal. To shine a light on them without trying to conceal the ugly truth they reflect about our country might be a meaningful way to engage with a reality many of us would rather deny.


 
 
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