Kalief Browder was 16 when he was arrested in 2010, as he walked home from a party in the Bronx. He was accused of stealing a backpack. Unable to post bail, Browder ended up spending the next three years of his life at the infamous Rikers Island jail, nearly two of them in solitary confinement. He committed suicide in 2015, not long after his release.
Rikers Island, which has a gory history, has since become a concrete symbol of what ails the American criminal justice system. The vast jail complex earned a reputation as a cauldron of violence, one that continues to haunt those inmates who have made it out. “It smells like a hospital, but it feels like a madhouse,” one formerly incarcerated man recalled in the New York Daily News.
In June, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio released a detailed plan to shut down Rikers, and create a jail system that’s “smaller, safer, fairer.” But what would such a system look like?
One answer to that question comes in the form of a new report, which argues that through better design, jail facilities can produce positive effects on the folks inside and outside their walls.
The report is the result of the Justice in Design initiative, which the Van Alen Institute launched in collaboration with New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform she spearheaded. Over the last few months, this initiative has brought together architects, environmental psychologists, criminal justice experts, and community members from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens—including those who were formerly incarcerated—to brainstorm a solution. Together, this team has come up with recommendations to reconfigure the geography, programming, and design of New York City’s jails.