A postcard by a Czech designer sparks a conversation with Raphael Sperry. The result is an interview I’ve entitled "The Unmaking of Prisons: What would happen if architects 'just said no' to incarceration facilities?"

It sounds a little like the Iraq war protests: passionate, a possible "danger" to national security, and seemingly futile. This is a smaller movement, much less visible, and no more a threat to U.S. security than people publicly asking whether it’s really a good idea to shoot first, ask questions later. Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) is a grassroots organization with about 300 members, a bad acronym – unless you speak Czech, in which case the pronunciation makes perfect sense – and a sneaky method of advocating change in the U.S. prison system.



I picked up this postcard and sat down with architect Raphael Sperry, who was distributing it at the American Institute of Architects National Convention in Boston, the largest annual gathering of American architects. Sperry is a past president of ADPSR’s National Board of Directors and the present chair of the Prison Design Boycott Committee. He contributed to the text on the back of the postcard, which argues that the current American prison system is not only morally questionable but also a financial drain that ultimately reduces budgets for societal needs such as schools and health care. As he spoke, I heard echoes of philosopher Michel Foucault’s “technologies of punishment” and “carceral continuum” – as, I’m sure, would many humanities scholars who find themselves face to face with a real-life prison activist.



PG: Could you explain the image on this postcard and say something about how it got there?

RS: ADPSR held a design competition for a poster that would explain to our audience of architectural designers and planners why not to work on future prisons and jails. This image is a kind of typical graphic design outline-person, but constrained in a small box made by the outline of the postcard. The overlay of the grid paper will remind architects of one of the common tools of the trade. So it heightens the connection between graphic design and drafting and the situation of incarceration. The window is there to make it clear that it’s referring specifically to jail.

The competition had three winners and this was one of them. Jan Šabach is a graphic and product designer who was working in New York City at the time and responded to the open call for entries in this competition. His use of this kind of standard language of graphic design was one of the things that resonated with the selection panel. Also the kind of high-contrast, high impact design, people felt was a powerful aspect of his entry.

I didn’t realize that Jan was dating a friend of my sister-in-law until later, after the anonymous judging. Now they’re married and I think they have a two-year-old. They’ve moved back to Europe. He’s from the Czech Republic, now I think they live in Munich and he commutes to Prague a couple of times a month for work.

PG: What inspired you to become a part of this campaign?

RS: When the American peace movement failed to stop the rush to war in Iraq, I thought we needed to do more to build a popular consciousness around peace and nonviolent conflict resolution in day-to-day life among Americans. I was dimly aware that there were big problems in the US prison system, and, being an architect, I felt prisons are about buildings in a way that few other social institutions and problems are. Some friends invited me to join the board of ADPSR and I did more research on the prison system, and was shocked to discover just how inequitable, racist and violent it actually is. So, to me, working for social justice in the realm of prisons is an extension of working for peace on the international level.

PG: Can you say more about what you’re calling the inequitable and racist aspects of the U.S. prison system?

RS: Many of the problems really start in the legal systems and end up in the prison system. The US now has over one percent of its adult population behind bars, which is eight to ten times the per capita rate of incarceration of any other industrialized country and is the highest rate of any country in the world, even including countries that hold political prisoners. So that’s a basic injustice because people in the US go to prison and serve long sentences for behavior that by international norms is not problematic. This is a result of American political trends including the so-called War on Drugs and “tough on crime” policies.

PG: But many Czechs, for example, would say that Czech laws and Czech prison sentences are not tough enough, especially for violent crimes. Those people feel that the American system is a lot fairer to the victims.

RS: I guess there’s a couple of ways to approach that. From what I’ve learned of criminology, prison is not a particularly effective deterrent to crime, and harsher sentences are not a stronger deterrent. People are much more deterred by the certainty that they’ll get caught than by the stiffness of the sentence. And then when you’re talking about violent crime, most of that can’t be deterred at all, because it occurs under circumstances of emotional distress, like situations of domestic violence or family conflict, where people don’t take time to think, “if I carry through with this, I might end up in jail.” Now if they’re not thinking about five years versus fifteen, it’s really not going to change the outcome for the victim. Using prisons for punishment [has a rationale that’s very different from] deterrence. Punishment can only protect the public after the crime has occurred, through the long-term learning of “I did something wrong, I was punished, I shouldn’t do it again” that somebody experiences. But the public also demands that prisons attempt to rehabilitate people to change their behavior. It’s basically impossible to try to rehabilitate somebody while simultaneously punishing them, because the two purposes are directly at odds with each other – in terms of the relationship between the authority and the individual. In rehabilitation the authority is there to help, in punishment it’s there to hurt, so how can it do both at once? Making longer sentences does not solve this dilemma.

PG: This seems a little over-idealistic in terms of human nature and the psyche of certain violent criminals in particular. Is there any hard sociological or other empirical evidence to support the view that rehabilitation without punishment can really reform the majority of violent criminals?

RS: Well, first I should point out that the majority of people in American prisons are non-violent offenders. They’re in for drug crimes or property crimes, many of which are linked with poverty. About sventy percent of American prisoners are functionally illiterate, which may not answer your questions, but indicates that there’s certainly a lot of room for a rehabilitative approach to give people life skills they were lacking, that would give them opportunities other than crime to improve their lot in life. As an architect, I haven’t really studied enough of the sociological literature to give a more complete answer to your question, but I also believe that Americans aren’t fundamentally worse people than people in other countries. So that’s one reason why I think that our rate of incarceration is so wrong.



PG: So are you saying, in a sense, that we might be able effectively to separate run-of-the-mill offenders from the most violent offenders in order to facilitate a system of rehabilitation that works as prevention of crime and recidivism?

RS: I’ve spoken with a lot of architects who do design prisons, and that [separating inmates according to level of violence] seems to be considered best practice in managing a prison. Professional approaches to prison management stress segregating the prison population according to their expected behavior within the prison. There’s a lot of expectation that many people in prison can be rehabilitated with appropriate circumstances and programming. All too often, those are lacking in a prison environment, because in this country it would be seen as “coddling” prisoners.

PG: In that case, why not just promote the building of better prisons or “rehabilitation facilities” rather than boycotting the creation of prisons altogether?

RS: That’s a good question. I hear it a lot. In California, for instance, where I live, every prison classroom and gymnasium is in use as an overflow housing unit because we put so many people in prison. A new prison just opened, and on the very first day, all of the spaces for rehabilitation activities were already being used for extra housing. So there’s no guarantee that prison management will match the intentions of the designer, and anyone who’s paid attention to trends in the United States over the last thirty years should be aware that building new prison space leads directly to more people in prison and has no correlation with rehabilitation. The director of the Ohio department of rehabilitation and correction was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, saying “If you build a prison, they’ll find a way to fill it.” And program spaces are the first spaces to go when budgets shrink or when bad laws keep sending non-violent people who’ve done very little wrong to jail. The professionals who manage prisons understand this dynamic and generally object to it, but they’ll also tell you no politician has ever lost an election by promising to build a new jail. We hope to change that dynamic by educating architects and the general public about the deeper implications of such a large prison system.


PG: Is it true that imprisoning more people for longer stretches of time does not correlate with decreases in crime, and that this is part of the reason why the “War on Drugs” has failed?

RS: Yes. From what I’ve seen, changes in the crime rate correlate much more with changes in the unemployment rate than criminal justice policy. Over the past thirty years, the crime rate has fluctuated dramatically, both up and down, twice. But the number of people in prison has only kept increasing. So I don’t see how you can argue that you’re always putting away the bad guys if sometimes that means crime is going up at the same time but sometimes that means crime is going down.

PG: Could you say more about the economic aspects of the U.S. prison system and its effect on taxpayers?

RS: Operating our prisons the way we do is incredibly expensive. It’s over fifty billion dollars a year for all sorts of things, from prison guard salaries to contracts for toilet paper, all of which is borne by taxpayers. In some cases, it really doesn’t pay off. For instance, with the longer sentences we have here, we have an increasing number of geriatric prisoners who can cost double, triple or more what it costs to incarcerate a younger person, but who pose far, far less of a threat to the public. Also unique to the United States is the phenomenon of private prison companies, who contract with the government to hold prisoners on a per-person, per-day fee. These companies have a large incentive in seeing as many people in prison as possible, irrespective of the crime rate, and they’ve become major donors in U.S. political campaigns. Just as troubling, with a prison system as large as ours: the associations and unions of prison guards are also big political players who have a financial interest in keeping more people in jail. The California prison guards’ union is in most years the number one or number two largest political campaign-funder in the entire state. The smaller system we envision is more tailored to public safety and far less open to corruption and political pandering than what you see today in the United States. Why other countries would aspire to what we have is beyond me.