NCJ Number
192846
Journal
Corrections Compendium Volume: 26 Issue: 11 Dated: November 2001 Pages: 1-2,4-5,25-28,29
Date Published
November 2001
Length
9 pages
Annotation
This article provides a history of correctional facility design and recommendations for the future.
Abstract
A correctional facility’s construction should reflect and aid the implementation of current correctional philosophies and goals. Early examples of places of confinement, such as cages within fortresses or abandoned castles, tended to be crude because they served other purposes prior to their use for incarceration. Until the French Revolution, the Bastille, a fortress-like castle, was used to hold a large number of inmates. Its high wall and drawbridge reinforced the era’s punishment philosophy. It wasn’t until the 12th century that the Christian church began to use prisons built specifically for offenders. It was at this point that solitary confinement was implemented. The bridewell, or prison, opened in London in 1557 and was aimed to rehabilitate offenders. After the American Revolution, the Pennsylvania Quakers crusaded for decent and humane punishment, and the Walnut Street Jail was established in 1790 in Philadelphia. The jail provided such regimes as manual labor, separation of dangerous offenders, and congregate cells, which served as a basic model for prison designs in the United States. The circular design, which had wings of cells protruding from it to allow correctional officers to watch over all corridors from a central location, served as the architectural design for a few American facilities. The radial design called for a central building for the correctional officers and individual cellblocks situating an array that created the shape of a fan or spokes of a wheel. The Auburn design, which was another version of the radial design, influenced the construction of facilities throughout the 1800's and into the 1900's. During the early 20th century, as rehabilitative philosophies and goals became more diversified, a facility shaped in the form of a telephone pole with the central post acting as the corridor and the crossbars as the cell blocks was developed. Current facility designs feature open campus layouts with perimeters of double fences and razor wire. Future correctional facilities should accommodate concepts of the direct-supervision philosophy, should be circular shaped to provide better visibility of individual cells, and should have one-tiered cells. 1 table, 38 references