Like the Equalizer Bunny, construction of correctional facilities just keeps on going.
While other real estate sectors have taken a hit after the frenzied overbuilding of the ’80s, there appears to be no end to the demand for more prisons and jails.
“The whole business of building prisons has been booming for the last decade plus,” said Nic Howell, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections. Since 1978, the state has built 12 new prisons and renovated three existing facilities, Howell said.
And as building continues to thrive, more top planners, architects and developers have been drawn to the form.
The emerging discipline of penal real estate comes as construction of new facilities tries to keep pace with a swelling inmate population, a result of stiffer sentences, reduced paroles and improved law enforcement.
From 1980 to 1993, inmates in state and federal prisons in Illinois shot up almost 150 percent from 329,821 to 824,901.
Likewise, population in city and county jails across the country has also risen, nearly tripling from 158,394 in 1978 to 486,525 in 1993.
“You’ve got to have somewhere to put these people,” said Rod Bottoms, senior correctional specialist at the National Institute of Correctional Facilities in Longmont, Colo., a division of the U.S. Justice Department.
Although the federal government and some states use prototypes for prison design, it’s hardly a cookie-cutter business, experts say. In fact, architects and builders interviewed deemed correctional facilities as some of the most challenging real estate projects.
“We often equate it to building a watch,” said Mark Wight, head of the Downers Grove architectural firm working on the 280,000-square-foot expansion of the DuPage County Jail in Wheaton. Prison design involves complexity on a variety of levels, Wight said.
“You’re creating almost miniature cities,” said Glenn Gauger, a principal and vice president of justice design at Sverdrup Facilities in St. Louis.
Correctional facilities have been getting larger in recent years in response to overcrowding and an attempt to achieve efficiencies of scale, Gauger explained. Besides housing for inmates, the property has to provide space for supplies, education and health care.
Even if prototypes exist, they generally have to be modified, depending on level of security (minimum, medium, maximum) and other factors, such as geography.
“You’re not going to build the same kind of prison in Minnesota as in Florida,” said Hardy Rauch, director of standards and accreditation at the American Correctional Association in Laurel, Md. Likewise, urban, surburban and rural sites vary in design.
Correctional facilities are divided into two broad categories: prisons and jails.
Whereas prisons provide housing for inmates already serving sentences, jails typically hold prisoners before trial or sentencing, which means jails have a wider range of occupants. “Jails are the starting point for everybody-whether you’re a drunken driver or John Wayne Gacy,” Wight said.
Prisons, on the other hand, can generally classify inmates by severity of offense. “You’re a known quantity in a prison, whereas a jail has tremendous turnover,” said Bruce Ream, vice president and a principal at O’Donnell, Wicklund, Pigozzi, & Peterson Architects Inc. in Deerfield.
Jails further contrast to prisons by having more diverse traffic (police officers, attorneys, families) and greater movement (from booking rooms to holding tanks; from cells to court). This adds to security concerns.
Roula Alakiotou, head of Roula Associates in Chicago, solved traffic problems for the Cook County Jail expansion by layering activities on different floors.
Inmate housing and programs are located on the first floor, the public enters on the second level, staff offices are on the third floor, and the fourth floor is for visits by attorneys, friends and family.
But jail or prison, sturdiness is a key construction theme.
“It’s a different palette of materials,” said Bob Shepperd, director of criminal justice planning and design at LZT Associates Inc., a Peoria-based architectural firm designing Illinois’s SuperMax.
Correctional facilities, of course, require more durable materials. Although traditional materials such as wallboard can be used in office areas, inmate housing is constructed from solid cement blocks with reinforced steel ties and special security glass.
“Even if a guy had an ax it would take him a while to get out,” said Steve Morris, vice president of Morse Diesel in Chicago, which is involved in the expansion of Cook County Jail, an $88 million facility with 640,000 square feet and 1,600 beds.
“Everything has much harder finishes. You have to think constantly about what goes in,” Ream said, explaining that virtually everything has the potential to be used as a weapon.
Inmates have plenty of time on their hands to devise escape plans, Morris says. “They can get very creative.”
Because of materials and the labor required, correctional construction takes longer than a commercial real estate facility.
Morris estimated that a 30-story office building could be built in about two years. However, the same square footage for prison would take another six months because of all the masonry work involved.
And executing plans must be precise, said Joseph Zosky, chief of operations at Paul H. Schwendener Inc., the construction company building the DuPage County Jail expansion. Embedded components must be placed in the right place to line up with beds, plumbing and lighting.
“You put a light switch in the wrong place, you have a big problem,” said Zosky, explaining that because walls are reinforced with steel and concrete, moving a fixture is no simple matter.
Not only does construction take longer, but it costs more, experts said, which is why economics determines where and how correctional facilities are built.
The design and construction of today’s jails and prisons reflect new technology as well as shifts in operational philopsophy, experts said.
Gone are the bars and long rows of cells that dominated early prisons. This concept was known as “linear intermittent” design because guards walked between the rows of cells to periodically check on prisoners, architect Ream said.
“Hopefully there are not many linear jails around,” said Ream, who chaired an AIA screening jury on justice facilities review. “They don’t allow good visual sightlines into cells.”
Over the past two decades, design moved from linear to pods, with cells clustered around a guard station in a circular fashion. This allows a guard to gaze into all cells without moving from his post.
Initially, guards were separated from prisoners, but in recent years correctional facilities have experimented with “direct supervision”-putting guards out on dayroom floors (common areas for inmates).
Although radical at first, direct supervision has come to dominate prison design. It helps reduce staff required to guard prisoners and alleviates stress between staff and inmates. Guards who are mixing with prisoners are better able to identify and head off problems before they erupt.
While the bricks and mortar side of correctional facilities has been evolving, so has public perception.
“Whereas we were once shunned, we are now clamored for,” said DOC spokesman Howell. When the state sought to build prisons in Centralia and Hillsboro in the late ’70s, there was “substantial opposition” from communities, he said.
This is in sharp contrast to the reception state officials got last year when shopping around for the site of the new $60 million super maximum security prison. Thirty-one communities were heard from-not to complain, but to make pitches.
“It got to the point we had to ask communities to tone down presentations,” Howell said, recalling fanfare that included welcome billboards, firetruck cavalcades, high school bands and roses.
Tamms, a community in downstate Illinois, won out with a package of inducements that, in addition to land, included two years of free water and sewer service and the extension of utility lines. Land is almost a standard giveaway today, Howell said.
Certainly, economics has played a major role in the warmer welcome. “It has finally dawned on city fathers that prisons bring a lot of jobs,” said Rauch, of the American Correctional Association.
Yet improved aesthetics have also bolstered public acceptance. Once designed like fortresses with bars and barbed wire out in the open, today’s correctional facilities are virtually indistinguishable from other structures.
Exteriors are designed to complement existing architecture in a community rather than sticking out like a sore thumb, experts said.
“They’re less imposing … there’s actually some attempt to landscape them,” said Magnus Seng, a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University. “Sometimes you can drive through the countryside and you don’t even know you’re looking at a prison,” he added.
Design also has changed on the inside, following a trend “to make prisons more humane,” said Gert Koerner, senior vice president at Morse Diesel, a large national construction company headquartered in Iselin, N.J.
Colors such as blue and green are replacing battleship gray on prison walls.
Interiors can be a touchy subject, with critics questioning the need to upgrade interiors for prisoners. Yet correctional officials counter that improved aesthetics are as much for staff as inmates.
“Architecture can become an enabling device,” agreed Fred Moyer, head of a Northbrook planning and design firm that specializes in correctional facilities.
Also, interiors “give you a management tool,” said Dee Halley, a programs specialist at the National Institute of Correctional Facilities. Design is done in varying levels of attractiveness, she said, explaining: “If (inmates) want to work and play well with others, they can move up to a better level.”
Design also can affect staff ratios, an area in which many institutions are experimenting in order to maximize efficiency. Because correctional facilities operate on a 24-hour, 365-day schedule, each staff position requires as many as five people to fill, said experts.
In DuPage County, the current jail has one staff member for every three inmates. The design of the new facility will reduce staff, altering the ration to one staffer to as many as 12 inmates, Wight said.
Increased use of technology-video imaging for booking, touch-screen control, electronic communications-can help lower costs.
Still, you have to be sure you’re not just adding gadgets, Halley said.
Technology doesn’t need coffee breaks, doesn’t fall asleep, or exhibit other “human frailties,” but it must be properly applied, Moyer agreed.
“Technology is great for places where people aren’t supposed to be,” Moyer said, citing motion detectors and night vision devices. But in places such as dayrooms, people do a better job of monitoring problems.
Some facilities are doing away with individual locks on cells, emphasizing security on the perimeter of the housing unit. This saves money on locks and plumbing, with common restrooms replacing in-cell fixtures. Moyer estimates that as much as $9,000 can be saved per those “dry cells.”
Adding to costs is the fact that correctional facilities are not immune to compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The Justice Department is still interpreting how to apply the law, Moyer said. Still, no prisoner can be denied access to programs.
Health care will be more of the focus for future prisons and jails, experts said. The prison population is growing older and has the same needs as other aging Americans, Ream said. His firm is working on a new medical facility for a prison in Florence, Ariz., which more than doubles capacity of hospital beds.
“We’re getting into correctional geriatrics,” Seng agreed.
Experts agree that correctional facilities have made great strides in recent years in terms of design. “Yet there’s still not a prison or jail that I walk into where I would want to stay,” Ream said. “We’ve come a long way. We still have a long way to go.”
Reform may not be a given inside correctional facilities, experts said. “Yet we can change the conditions of confinement so inmates are not damaged further,” Seng said. If treated like animals, inmates tend to act like animals, he said. “If you treat inmates like responsible people they might well act that way.”
