A Visual Investigation into the Remixed Architecture of Carceral Humanism
BY JACK DURAN
E co-prisons. Feminist jails. Justice hubs. Reflection cottages. Therapeutic communities. Restorative villages. The 21st century has given rise to a new generation of hydridized carceral experiments that fuse care and control into a new, more effective penal model, have been referred by James Kilgore (2014) as carceral humanism — the practice of repackaging carceral discipline and control as a benevolent social service. Jurisdictions, from North Dakota to New York City, are increasingly shifting away from conventionally punitive penal models and architectural styles and funding the construction of modern, flexible, and modular prisons that increasingly resemble office buildings — in an intentional effort to blend prisons into their surroundings through deceptively normalized aesthetics, rather than distinguishing them from their surroundings through imposing and intimidating designs as has been common practice in the last few centuries since the birth of the modern prison.
These trends reflect a growing emphasis by government officials — often lobbied by private actors, such as nonprofits, foundations, architects, urban designers, and real estate developers — on normalizing prisons. That is, completely reconstructing, renovating, and redesigning prison conditions to simulate the outside society in ways that enable prisons to placate critics by repositioning themselves as progressive and humane institutions. This, they say, is the future of corrections. Indeed, emphasizing high-performance, sustainability, mobility, interaction, and automation, these new-generation carceral models embrace neoliberal management strategies adopted in corporate workplaces that reimagine the prison as a space driven by, among other things, productivity, innovation, and optimization, and which rehabilitate incarcerated people, formerly excluded from the economy, into productive and contributing citizens, or what Michel Foucault terms, homoeconomicus — self-entrepreneurial subjects remade in service of the neoliberal order.
New jails are called “campuses.” Inmates are called “residents,” “clients,” and “apprentices.” Cell blocks are called “housing” and “communities.” Private consultants, from nonprofits to multinational corporations involved in carceral reform rebrand themselves as “disruptors,” and correctional guards as “professionals.” Incarceration, under this emerging neoliberal regime, is increasingly reframed as a “service” in a shift from more conventionally punitive models of corrections. And, the user-centered prison, reimagined as a medium of capitalism, itself becomes ever modern, transparent, mobilized, sustainable, adaptive, automated, modular, high-performing, replicable, iterative, and reconfigurable.
Calls to transform the violent, degrading, and corrupt culture of American prisons, if not outright abolish them, have enabled the emergence of global learning exchanges between prisons in different countries — what I term carceral diplomacy — as they turn abroad, particularly to Scandinavia, for a silver bullet to their problems. Ashley Kilmer and Ami Abdel-Salam (2022) write, “As U.S. policymakers continue to grapple with the damage wrought by mass incarceration, many have taken increasing interest in these ‘Scandinavian-style’ prisons, attempting to find ways to emulate their architecture, practices, and policies back in the states.”
With prison reform enjoying a détente amid a crisis in mass incarceration and a growing movement to abolish it, numerous U.S. jurisdictions across the country, such as North Dakota, Connecticut, and New York City — which is now embarking on the nation’s largest and most expensive jail construction project to replace its Rikers Island complex — have all recently sent delegations on study trips to European prisons with missions to learn, import, and transplant European penal models in the U.S. At the top of their itineraries is often Norway's Halden Prison — dubbed by Time Magazine, "the world's most humane prison."
What is it about Halden that has captured the attention of the world? And, why are prison reformers seeking to reimagine American prisons in its image? For the average American, it is hard to tell considering that prisons are often blackboxes to the public — out of sight and out of mind. This project seeks to open that black box, asking: What if instead of simply looking at photos of a new-generation prison, you could move through it and experience it? Reconstructed from dozens of photographs I have taken of Halden Prison as part of my work to document prison conditions, practices, and architecture in the U.S. and Europe, the following immersive 3D scene virtually walks you through a cell block of Halden Prison to get a glimpse of what reformers are working to replicate in America, and why looks are not always what they seem.
E stablished in 2010, Norway's Halden Prison is something of a marvel, even a fetish, for American reformers increasingly looking to infuse prisons with the kinds of neoliberal-driven human-centered design strategies that are at the heart of Halden’s world-famous penal approach. “To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien,” writes New York Times reporter, Jessica Benko. “Its modern, cheerful and well-appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere — these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all.”
As a 21st century new-generation prison, Halden’s ability to blend in, rather than stand out from, its surroundings — eschewing the disciplinary and intimidating designs that often characterize conventional prisons in favor of a modernist corporate design approach that emphasizes open floorplans, biophilic design, barless windows, natural materials, open sunlight, and more — communicates a sense of normality and humanism to the public that one would rarely expect from a prison. And yet, Halden, counter to convention, has been able to position itself globally as the model to adopt in its effort to market itself as the future of corrections. Today, corrections agencies from across the world travel to and tour Halden with the hopes of replicating it in their own countries.
AN IRON FIST IN A SILK GLOVE
Still, critics argue that the fetishism of Halden’s aesthetic modernism by reformers has led them to ignore or overlook the actual lived experiences of the incarcerated people there who, despite Halden’s modern aesthetics, remark that it is, nevertheless, still a prison.
Indeed, in an ethnographic study conducted inside Halden by Ashley Kilmer and Sami Abdel-Salam (2022), numerous respondents pointed out, that the goal of prisons, which is to deprive people of liberty and freedom, is fundamental incompatible with a notion of a truly therapeutic setting. They say that, beneath Halden's veneer, “[t]hey faced constant surveillance, saw locked windows, and were surrounded by the looming wall that encases the prison grounds. It’s true that Halden did not need to resort to bars on the windows or have guard towers manned by snipers. But that is partially because the ‘tightness’ produced by the surveillance and control tactics were an effective reminder that the respondents were captive in a punitive environment.” All to say that looks can be deceiving, for they are not always what they seem.
HALDEN'S CARCERAL HUMANISM
The carceral dialectics that Halden strategically wields which remixes together captivity and therapy, control and care, punishment and rehabilitation, brutality and humanization, freedom and unfreedom, institutionalization and normalization, regression and progressivism, has been described by Judah Schept (2015) as progressive punishment — likening it to a modern version of the 19th century Mettray Penal Colony so familiarized by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. But it is, perhaps, best encapsulated by James Kilgore (2014) who refers to this model increasingly being adopted by prisons across the world as carceral humanism.
CARCERAL MASHUP
FROM THE TOWER TO THE CAMPUS
A Scandinavian-inspired design and site proposal for a new borough-based jail in Brooklyn.
REMIXING CARCERALITY
In the U.S., a new-generation hybridized carceral architecture is born amid a national crisis in mass incarceration.
I nnovations in carceral design and practices in countries like Norway and Germany have enabled the emergence of a global exchange among subnational actors that emphasize “copying” and “pasting” (import, replicate, and transplant) European penal models across the world. Implicit in their neoliberal assumptions is that carceral interventions that work in Scandinavia can be expected to work everywhere else, irrespective of their macro-level cultural, historical, and political economic differences. Naturally, this has facilitated the globalization of a new-generation, efficient and high-performing carceral model, inspired by Norway’s state-of-the-art Halden Prison, that are designed to be flexible, adaptable, networked, and replicable, catching the attention of American reformers on the other side of the Atlantic.
Researchers from Drexel University and the University of Oslo, Jordan M. Hyatt et al.(2021) — who, themselves, have been working to transplant Halden's model in a Pennsylvania prison unit they dub "Little Scandinavia" — argue that American exceptionalism has prevented the U.S. from learning from the innovations of other countries, including when it comes to corrections, saying, “Remarkably, one of the German correctional leaders later wrote that he was surprised to hear from Americans. He had regular visitors from other countries near and far, ‘but we have never had anyone from the United States. In over thirty years of working in corrections, in different positions, never have I seen U.S. visitors.’”(1724). But, a tide is turning. In recent years, amid a tipping point in the crisis of mass incarceration and aburgeoning prison abolitionist movement, reformers have in the past decade increasingly funded and facilitated global exchanges with the intention of importing Scandinavian carceral models into the U.S., adapting them, and "remixing" them with American practices to birth a hybridized model that selectively applies certain aspects of Halden to American prisons — retrofitting, and sometimes constructing new, prisons in the image of Halden.
Sophie Angelis (2022), explaining the logics behind this trend in “copying” European models, writes: “Prison reform relies on the idea that prisons can be made humane. But a difficulty for reformists, at least in the United States, is that there is not much proof for that proposition. U.S. prisons are violent, degrading, and corrupt—a fact that reformists readily acknowledge. So for proof that prisons are perfectible, reformists turn abroad. This move is not new. As historian Randall McGowen writes, a feature of prison reform throughout history is ‘the idea that a proper prison regime already exist[s], only somewhere else.’ Today, that ‘somewhere else’ is Northern Europe, and in particular, Norway.”(8).
CARCERAL HUMANISM & ITS DISCONTENTS
Some, however, have serious concerns about the tendency of reformers to appropriate the language and aesthetics of progressivism to rebrand confinement as a luxury experience. “Deploying euphemisms which almost defy parody, these expert architects reimagine what future prisons could look like: prisoners are recast as ‘clients’ who wake up not in dingy shared cells but in their own individual rooms furnished with sleek minimalist furniture where large windows allow for natural light," Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan (2021) argue. "So-called clients also have their own restrooms in stark contrast to the shared showers of contemporary prisons and instead of being idle, they attend individual and collective therapy sessions, socialize freely with others, and even cook healthy gourmet food” (608). They continue, “If these prisons that [architects] imagine resemble an Ikea commercial, it is because visits to Dutch and German prisons provided the inspiration.” Core to their argument is that such fetishism of architectural modernism as the supposed salve for a dehumanizing prison system is fundamentally concerned with only cosmetics rather than “concerned with addressing any of the social ills and structural inequalities that prisons and carceral spaces seek to manage” (608). In other words, they suggest that this remixing of Scandinavian and American carceral practices, which is ushering in an "Ikea-fication" of American prisons, is merely a “repackaging” of mass incarceration.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, writing on the dark side of humanitarianism, argues, “Reform, then as now, opens the door to expanding the prison under the guise of social improvement.” Such critiques caution us to consider that innovation, including in carceral reform, is no guarantee of progress. Indeed, as Maya Shenwar and Victoria Law (2020) reminds us, "In so many cases, reform is not the building of something new. It is the re-forming of the system in its own image, using the same raw materials: white supremacy, a history of oppresion, and a toolkit whose main contents are confinement, isolation, surveillance, and punishment."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Michelle. “Foreword.” Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, The New Press, New York, 2021.
Benko, Jessica. “The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison.” The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/the-radical-humaneness-of-norways-halden-prison.html.
“Bringing Scandinavian Practices to U.S. Prisons.” Arnold Ventures, 2020, www.arnoldventures.org/stories/prison-project-little-scandinavia
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation. Verso, 2023.
Hyatt, Jordan M., et al. “We Can Actually Do This”: Adapting Scandinavian Correctional Culture in Pennsylvania.” Am. Crim. L. Rev., vol. 58, no. 1716, 2021.
Kilmer, Ashley, and Sami Abdel-Salam. “Pretty and Punitive.” Inquest, 20 Oct. 2022, inquest.org/pretty-and-punitive/
Kurti, Zhandarka, and Jarrod Shanahan. “Carceral Non-Profits and the Limits of Prison Reform.” ACME, 2021, acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1975
Schenwar, Maya, and Victoria Law. Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms. The New Press, 2021.
