Gilded Cages

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."