Prison Architecture Criminal Justice, Prison Architecture

The evolution of prison architecture is a reflection of societies changing attitudes toward crime and punishment. Prisons have progressed from simple places for incarceration where the primary purpose is to protect the public to instruments of punishment where the loss of freedom is penalty for breaking the law, to institutions for reform dedicated to mould the guilty to conform to society's norms. Initially imprisonment was a means of detaining debtors to ensure payment, the accused before trial, or the guilty before punishment. Courts imposed sentences including fines, personal mutilation such as flogging or branding, or death. In 18th-century England transportation to penal settlements in the Thirteen Colonies and later Australia, became an increasingly popular penalty because it removed the guilty from local society; length of sentence and destination reflected the severity with which the court viewed the offence. Eventually a new type of prison, the penitentiary, came into being. Buildings were designed to be supervised by paid staff. They established labor programs designed to teach work habits and help maintain the institution. Inmates were sorted...

It was expected that penitentiaries would act as deterrents to crime (Johnson, 2011)
Prison reformers sought to add reform to punishment and deterrence as a principle of prison design. Believing that criminality was caused by a lack of moral values and social structure in the individual's life, advocates of reformatory prisons argued that a regimen of silence, isolation, religious training and hard labor could force the inmate to self-examination, an awareness of the cost of criminality, and the importance of approved social values and work habits.

In the early decades of the 19th century, American social commentators in New York and Pennsylvania devised 2 architectural formulas to support the reform principle. The Auburn approach employed cellblocks consisting of rows of very small cells placed back-to-back in the centre of the building and separate large workshops where inmates labored together. The Pennsylvania system advocated cellblocks laid out in a radial pattern from a principal supervisory station, each block consisting of a central corridor flanked by rows of comparatively large cells where the inmate lived and worked for his entire sentence.…