A New Prison Is Still a Prison
A “Justice” Architecture Conference Without Listening to Formerly Incarcerated Women?
Architects and designers are gathering in Minneapolis October 7th–9th for the American Institute of Architects’ Academy of Architecture for Justice conference. Its agenda emphasizes humane design, improved health, and reduced incarceration.
Formerly incarcerated women organizing with The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls are challenging the premise behind that work: There is no such thing as a trauma-informed prison.
More natural light does not end forced confinement. A redesigned visiting room does not end family separation. A new medical wing does not guarantee that someone will receive care.
The question is not simply whether architects can improve a building. It is whether another prison should be built at all.
The National Council’s Against Prison Architecture toolkit gives communities ways to challenge prison construction during the design process, drawing on organizing against new women’s prisons in Massachusetts and Vermont.
A Culture of Harm Cannot Be Designed Away
AIA’s ethics code prohibits members from knowingly designing spaces for executions or torture, including indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement. But an architect’s intentions do not determine how prison officials will use a building.
In Massachusetts, people incarcerated in units introduced after solitary confinement reforms reported that prolonged isolation continued under new names. In 2024, Bolts documented their accounts of restricted movement, limited human contact, and barriers to education and other programs.
Changing a unit’s name does not change what happens inside it. Neither does changing its floor plan.
Design cannot resolve a culture of punishment while leaving the authority to isolate, restrict, and deny access to services intact.
A Medical Wing Is Not the Same as Medical Care
New prisons are often presented as opportunities for better healthcare, education, and treatment. But providing space for a service is not the same as ensuring people receive it.
A clinic needs qualified staff and timely access. A classroom requires teachers and permission to attend. Those are questions of funding, policy, and institutional practice, not simply square footage.
In 2024, Champree Dinkins, then incarcerated at MCI-Framingham, described how placement in an isolation unit interrupted her education: “I have one semester left of Babson [College], and I haven’t been given the opportunity to finish from the SAU.”
The barrier she described was access.
People in prison deserve adequate care and humane conditions now. They shouldn't have to wait for a construction project, and people outside prison shouldn't have to lose their freedom to get support.
The priority should be accessible healthcare, housing, education, and community treatment, not making incarceration the route to services people should already have.
A New Prison Can Become an Overcrowded Prison
New construction alone does not resolve overcrowding.
In September 2024, the Irish Examiner reported that Limerick Prison’s women’s facility held 79 women in accommodation designed for 56. Despite the move to new accommodation, overcrowding persisted.
That example does not establish why individual women were imprisoned. It does demonstrate the limits of treating construction as the solution.
Presenting a prison as a place of healing creates another danger: it can make confinement easier to justify rather than strengthen the case for alternatives.
The goal should be fewer people incarcerated, not more places to incarcerate them.
Architects Can Choose Not to Build
The language of “justice” and “humane design” should not obscure the financial interests involved. Public prison projects can still generate private profits through architectural and construction contracts. The National Council’s organizing challenges both those interests and the use of therapeutic language to promote new prisons.
Architects can choose which projects they accept.
The National Council reports that, after it requested meetings with several firms working on prison projects, only one agreed to meet with formerly incarcerated women. Following that conversation, the firm chose not to pursue the contract to design a new women’s prison in Massachusetts.
Listening can require more than revising a design; it can mean reconsidering whether to participate at all.
Architects can refuse new incarceration projects and work alongside directly impacted communities to design housing, healthcare facilities, and other spaces that support people without confining them.
Use the Toolkit to Challenge Prison Construction
The National Council’s Against Prison Architecture toolkit explains how understanding the design process can help communities intervene in prison and jail construction. It brings together lessons from organizing in Massachusetts and Vermont, including opportunities involving public pressure, legal challenges, and local zoning fights. It also identifies additional strategies for communities to explore.
Explore Against Prison Architecture, share it with organizers and architects, and use it to identify where your community can challenge a prison project.
Formerly incarcerated women are not simply asking for a seat at the design table. They are challenging the decision to build another prison.
Invest in what people need to live, heal, and remain in their communities, not another place to incarcerate them.
We hope you will share your lessons organizing against the design of new prisons with us. Please email afrizzell@thecouncil.us if you have lessons to share.
