Gilded Cages

By Mary Cronin

Last New Year's Day, Boston's Sheriff Robert Rufo gave 935 hardened criminals a present: a postmodern pink concrete-and-brick high-rise home -- a new designer prison, with a colonnaded inner courtyard where the inmates, clad in bright orange jackets, could stroll in pairs. Inside, brightly colored dayrooms equipped with televisions, butcher-block tables and cushy chairs completed a picture of serenity. For inmates and their watchers alike, it was a far cry from the dank, forbidding, Victorian-style Suffolk County House of Correction they had left behind on the banks of Boston Harbor. Gone were the five tiers of cages, the earsplitting clash of steel against steel as hundreds of cell doors slammed shut in unison; gone was the cavernous, clattering mess hall, whose ambiance was an invitation to riot. Sheriff Rufo and Boston had just bought into the new architecture of justice.

Building jails and prisons is big business these days. It is the product of both urgent necessity and emerging philosophy: an exploding population of convicts on the one hand and, on the other, some new theories on how to treat them. In the past decade, the war on drugs and tough mandatory-sentencing laws have helped double the number of inmates, which reached a record 1.1 million this year. To house and feed this army of incarcerated souls, states have poured $30 billion into construction in the past 10 years. This year they will spend $7 billion more, while the Federal Government will plow $2 billion into a system that is demanding 1,100 new beds every week. After Medicare, corrections is the fastest-growing item in most state budgets, eating into scarce funds earmarked for health, education, transportation and social services.

Exploiting this dire need for more jail beds, enlightened corrections officers like Rufo are pushing for "direct supervision" of prisoners, a concept that requires new functional designs. These, in turn, have inspired a creative breed of architects and builders who are capitalizing on the challenge of building facilities that provide the kinds of living spaces that officers can properly manage. "Besides requiring fewer officers to run," argues Rufo, these New Age facilities "cut down on fights, assaults, vandalism and workmen's compensation cases. Most important, they take control of the prison out of the hands of the inmates."

Modern prison design has been evolving since the late '60s, when the federal Bureau of Prisons first tried replacing dangerous linear tiers of steel cages with rectangular modules of cells built around common rooms manned by officers. The results were dramatic: violence among inmates and between inmates and officers decreased. Prisoners no longer controlled the jails. Some state prisons, wary of exposing guards directly to inmates, modified the design, positioning guards as observers in secure booths. The results were less successful: inmates, still isolated, remained in control. In 1981 California's Contra Costa County jail was the first county jail to take down all the barriers between prisoners and officers. Exercise rooms, traditional furnishings -- even an open booking area without cells -- were added. The changes relieved stress, reduced stereotypical behavior by both inmates and officers, and vastly reduced violence and vandalism. Corrections officials began to see the concept's full potential. "It is so revolutionary," says jail architect Jay Farbstein. "After hearing the anecdotal information, you get a really strong feeling for the power of the idea and how well it works."

Boston's Suffolk County House of Correction, like the new Suffolk County Jail four miles away, is typical of the new design. Each housing unit is a self-contained triangular pod consisting of 30 to 60 cells on two floors overlooking a common room. Prisoners are separated into units according to their conduct rather than the seriousness of their crimes. Good behavior is rewarded with advancement through a series of increasingly privileged units, the highest of which allows inmates to spend the day in the common room, locked in with only one or two unarmed officers. Meals are shipped from central kitchens and served cafeteria style from warming tables in each pod so that prisoners never congregate in overwhelming numbers. Key to the success of the concept is the interaction between inmates and "officers," new prisonspeak for guards.

Rufo fumes when he hears the new environs derided as "glamour slammers," as they are by critics who argue that it is politically unwise to make convicts so comfortable. Explains Denver-based criminal-justice consultant Ray Nelson: "Carpeting on the floors, ceramic rather than steel toilets, coordinated uniforms, wooden cell doors are all cost-effective. Besides, amenities send a message of expectation of behavior, a message that works." Included in the concept is another reversal of conventional wisdom: a stretch in jail may actually rehabilitate. So convinced is Rufo that literacy training can reduce recidivism that he shepherded a law through the Massachusetts legislature last year requiring functionally illiterate county prisoners to take basic reading courses before becoming eligible for parole. Proceeds from the jailhouse commissary help pay the cost of teachers and supplies. And because part of the direct-supervision model is to normalize the environment, space is reserved for recreation, specialty-group meetings such as Alcoholics Anonymous or drug-therapy sessions, and religious functions. Says Rufo: "We have to let people have time to study, pray and let off steam, which is why the dayroom is valuable."

In Texas, where the inmate population doubled in the past dozen years and voters last year approved a $1.1 billion bond issue to build 24 new state prisons, hard-line corrections officials want to see more proof that the new concept is effective. Seven months ago, Tarrant County moved 1,440 maximum- security inmates from three old, overcrowded facilities into its newly built Tarrant County Correction Center in Fort Worth, the first fully functioning direct-supervision jail system in the state; it features sunny single cells with windows, no bars. "Since then," says the center's newly appointed warden, Major James Skidmore, "we have not had one piece of graffiti written on the walls, one toilet stopped up, one officer or inmate struck or injured. Our officer turnover rate has dropped to 5.4% from 18% in our linear jails, where on average an officer is injured once a day and costly compensation cases come up once a month. Having budgeted $20,000 for jailhouse repairs for the first year, so far we have spent $50 for two panes of broken glass.

"It is a matter of addressing human needs," Skidmore maintains. Savings on heavy-security construction went to larger single cells, multipurpose rooms, classrooms equipped with computers. Because not enough veteran officers in the * system were willing to work in the new jail, Skidmore enlisted 95 new hires from the area and put them through 160 hours of training. "After six months on the job," he says, "seeing an inmate who messes up, my officers think they have failed." Direct supervision is a giant step for Texas, where sheriffs as a rule act tough and dip snuff. The touchy-feely character of direct supervision may rub them the wrong way. But what is forcing them to take Tarrant County seriously is its cost-efficiency and the mounting evidence that inmates are better managed. With overcrowding the most pressing problem in Texas jails, followed by a shortage of funds, most counties are scrambling to build quick, cheap housing. Only two small direct-supervision facilities are planned at this stage, but Skidmore says word is getting around the community that he's running a winner.

Nationally, big-city jailers, their hands already full controlling pretrial detainees and short-term prisoners in overcrowded conditions, tend to resist such reforms. They want more proof that the new designs are truly more efficient and that their guards will be safe. Proponents counter that with proper screening, violent prisoners, who account for only 10% of inmates, can be isolated in highly secure areas, while the general population could dwell in less expensive -- and relatively normal -- environments.

Trouble is, the country's penal system is already moving toward increased compartmentalization, creating separate drug-treatment facilities, boot camps for young offenders, women's prisons complete with secure apartments in which children can live with their mothers. Some see in the longer mandatory sentences handed out these days a need for special accommodations in prisons for the elderly and sick who require therapy, medication, wider cell doors for wheelchairs, even Braille signs on doors.

Direct-supervision management as it is practiced, say converts, can save almost 40% in construction and equipment costs and nearly 30% in operations, at least for the basic facility. In the past few years, 93 such jails and prisons have come on-line, and 60 others are either under construction or planned. But the benefactors of this public largesse -- the architects, builders and contractors, as well as merchants and job seekers in countless rural towns that are actively looking to new prisons as a vehicle for economic rebirth -- may be inadvertently driving the costs beyond a level American society as a whole can afford.

% Ultimately, new jail and prison designs aren't going to solve the nation's crime problem. Though humane treatment in newly designed facilities is valuable, it is not a substitute for improved management of coherent housing, education, health and welfare strategies that "rehabilitate" potential criminals before they go to jail in the first place.

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Huntsville