Show notes
Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher orOvercast.For Breezeblock #30, editor christin hu chats with community organizers Maggie Luna, Avalon Betts-Gaston, and Sashi James about their recent action at HDR (Henningson, Durham, Richardson), one of the largest architecture firms in the world, who are responsible for designing hundreds of prisons. Together, they discuss the reasons why architects should refuse to take part in the building of prisons and what they can do instead. On June 24, The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Families for Justice as Healing, Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, Design as Protest, Texas Statewide Leadership Council, and Illinois Alliance for Reentry & Justice organized an action outside of HDR’s office in Chicago (same day as the AIA conference) demanding that this international Architecture, Engineering, and Planning firm stop designing prisons (they have designed over 275). This marks just one of many actions inviting HDR to work with (rather than against) communities over the past years. Read the full statement of demands here and original letter to HDR here. Below is an edited transcription of the conversation. Some links and resources are provided at the end of the article. TRANSCRIPTION christin (CH): Hello and welcome to Failed Architecture Breezeblocks, where our editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name is christin hu and I’m an editor on Failed Architecture’s New York City team, and I’m here with Maggie Luna, Avalon Betts-Gaston and Sashi James, who have been organizing against the building of prisons. Maggie (ML): Hi, I’m Maggie Luna. I am in Texas. I work with the Statewide Leadership Council. I am a community outreach coordinator and lead organizer for formerly incarcerated people and advocates in Texas. Avalon (AB): Hi, thanks for having me. My name is Avalon Betts-Gaston. I am the project manager for the Illinois Alliance for Reentry and Justice. Obviously, we’re out of Illinois. We’re a coalition of directly impacted people, service providers, stakeholders and allies all united to remaking the criminal legal system. Thanks for having me. Sashi (SJ): Hi, I’m Sashi James, and I’m in Families for Justice as Healing, and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. I am a daughter of formerly incarcerated parents, and I’m the Reimagining Communities director based in Massachusetts, but I’m from New York. And I’m really excited to be here. Thank you for giving us this platform. CH: Awesome. Just to kind of kick off our conversation give an intro to the folks who are listening in… On June 24, The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Families for Justice as Healing, Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, Design As Protest, Statewide Leadership Council, and Illinois Alliance for Reentry and Justice organized an action outside of HDR’s office in Chicago, which was the same day as the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Conference. They were demanding that this international architecture, engineering and planning firm, stop designing prisons, of which they’ve designed over 275. So just to kind of kick off our questions here, and I’ll direct this to Sashi, who has been lead organizer for this effort, but since the action, have you been able to meet with HDR leadership at all? SJ: No, we have not heard anything from the HDR leadership team. And I just wanted to also say that the standout that we had was one of many standouts. We have come to their front door many times in Massachusetts – we actually organized about a two-month stand out in front of their office right in downtown. We never heard anything then, and we still haven’t heard anything now. And this is multiple times that we’ve actually met them where they’re at. So it’s disappointing as a community organizer. AB: I mean, I’d like to jump in, I feel like they’re being unresponsive to our invitation to work with us, to design things that our communities need. And the last thing that we need are more jails and prisons, because those have only really produced more harm in the communities that have been disproportionately affected by the building of jails and prisons. And so this has been an open invitation to begin to discuss what different looks like. How can we actually work together in concert to build communities up, and not prisons and jails. And so we can’t stop. This campaign, this project, this effort can’t stop, because we’re really talking about lives and liberty of actual human beings. So the importance of the stopping of designing and buildings of jails and prisons is, is vital to our communities. And so, you know, we will continue to put pressure on different pressure points in the industry. So we again, extended an invitation for HDR to come and talk to us, to understand what our concerns are and why we don’t need new jails and prisons to be built in our country. And their refusal to even engage in a conversation with us is really more indicative of them and the position that they’re taking, than of us, because we focus on harm reduction in every aspect. And so that is why we wanted to speak with them, to explain to them how this hurts our communities. And if their only consideration is how much money they can make off the caging of people, then that’s going to be their problem. We’re going to continue to put pressure on new architects, and students who want to become architects. We’re going to find and talk to everybody in this industry to explain to them why the building of prisons and jails is very harmful to communities, and specifically, communities of color and poor communities. And so their reticence to speak with us is not going to diminish our efforts in any way, shape, or form. CH: Yeah, I hear that. And actually, a lot of our audiences are young architects or, you know, folks who are entering the profession. So hopefully they listen in and hear this. It’s really important discussion. And on that point, too—I know you haven’t heard anything from HDR specifically—but perhaps you’ve heard other questions or oppositions? ML: I think the most common opposition that I hear whenever I bring this up in any conversation is, “Well, we just want to make it ‘better’ for women.” And that is aggravating because none of these people who have spoken to me have actually been inside of a prison, and there’s nothing that you can do. I don’t care if you give me Louis Vuitton sheets and house slippers, you know? I’m still in a prison, I’m still separated from my family, I’m still not being prepared with resources to reenter society successfully, and then I’m still going to have that stigma when I walk out that I have now a felony or whatever that I have to take care of. So, it doesn’t matter how pretty you make it, how many gardens you put on it. The fact is, there’s harm. And we’re doing harm not only to that person, but to the families. And so when you harm those families, you’re harming communities. At the end of the day, if you really say you care about community safety, then you should be focusing on investing in housing for families to stay together, so the communities can stay safe. CH: That point could not be emphasized more. It’s still a prison. And I’ve seen a lot of architects also labeling these as “justice centers,” or, you know, using these euphemisms, like “feminist jail.” I’m like, “Okay, well, look, it’s still a jail, right?” AB: And I’d like to add to what sister Maggie just talked about. So above and beyond the immediate and direct harm to the family—and therefore, by extension to the community—of removing someone, specifically people who the system identifies as women or who may self-identify as female, and putting them into these women’s facilities, there is one other glaring truth: the culture inside of these institutions is such that every single day, women are either witness to, or the subject of sexual, verbal, and/or physical abuse—and that is driven by the culture. There is no amount of paint, there is no amount of posh, and there is no amount of anything else that you can use to design away the culture. That is really the problem with the so-called “feminist jails” and “trauma informed prisons”. Using this language is to soften what these buildings actually are; because of that culture that is embedded in and cannot be taken out of those institutions, by paint, by design, by any of those things, because you cannot remove that—you [architects] cannot prevent the people who are housed in those institutions from experiencing that specific type of harm. So when you think about it, there’s no there’s no workaround for that cultural problem that is just pervasive in every single facility that houses women, or people who are nonbinary, or people who identify as women. And you don’t have to believe me, just do Google searches on how many prisons in Illinois or in the United States have had officers arrested as a result of sexual misconduct—that’s the most egregious one: rape and sexual misconduct. What’s not being reported are the everyday verbal and physical assaults that are happening, and so when you think about how much harm is committed inside of those institutions, I just need to really emphasize that there’s no designing that away, you cannot design that away. SJ: Touching on what Miss Avalon and Miss Maggie said is that, also, the prison or jail does not get to the root issue of why women are even getting inside of the prison in the first place. And then on top of not addressing the root issue of the harm that they already were dealing with, now it’s [the building of prisons and jails] only causing more harm to these women. And my issue with HDR is, when I was actually on the call when they were presenting what a so-called “trauma-informed prison” would look like, one of the things that stood out to me the most was that they are putting a nursery inside of this prison, and allowing women that are pregnant and incarcerated to have their child for up to one year to be with the child when their child is born. And so as a mother, I’m like, okay, so we feel safe enough to allow our women to be inside of a cage, inside of this violent community, because we know what Miss Avalon said about all the all the harm that’s happening inside of prisons, where it’s supposed to just be a place where you [the institution] are supposed to be caring for people’s lives—because if you take women from the community, that’s your responsibility to make sure that they’re safe, where they’re at, but there is still harm being done. Now we’re putting children inside of this cage, I mean, with women who are supposedly not even safe enough to be in the community—where are we going with this, right? How do you even feel comfortable allowing a woman to have a baby if she’s so harmful? So that means we need to start to reevaluate the situation, and figure out how we can allow this mother to be a mother in her community. And that’s all that we’re saying. I don’t know what it’s like in Texas or Chicago, but in Massachusetts, it costs $162,000 to keep a woman incarcerated. And for us, the number one reason why a woman is incarcerated is because they don’t have access to housing. And so when you talk about a woman, I have an access to housing 82% of those women are mothers not having access to housing. And as a mother, as a mother myself, I would do the most vulnerable thing to provide for my child. So if we had $50 million here in Massachusetts, to build a new women’s prison, why aren’t we thinking about using some of that funding to build housing for our mothers and our children, so that they’re not causing more harm in the community? And so to go back to what I was talking about, we don’t want to take money from architects! We understand that y’all have to feed your families, just like we have to feed our families. But what we know is that if you build a new prison, they’re gonna figure out how to put our children in those new prisons—our granddaughters in those new prisons. And that’s what we’re putting a stop to, because change starts with us, and we’re going to be that change. We’re saying that we don’t need a new women’s prison and that we need different. And so that’s why we’re calling on y’all [architects and building industry professionals] to respond. And so I just felt like I had to get that out. CH: Thank you so much for sharing that—that’s a really critical message. If the main cause for being incarcerated in Massachusetts is lack of housing, well, architects, we could design housing! ML: I want to just want to add to what both Avalon and Sashi said. The humiliation that I experienced inside of jails and prison, had nothing to do with the architect with the way it was built. These people get into these positions, and go on these power trips and feel like it is their mission to dehumanize you, it just makes me so fearful that they are thinking about putting children in these situations. There might be six wonderful COs [Correctional Officers] that would be very loving, but there’s going to be that one that wants to come in and ruin that person’s life. And it doesn’t matter what they say, you know, some of these things stick with us for the rest of our lives, and I mean, that just has to be remembered that you cannot build a feminist jail—it’s an oxymoron—it doesn’t make sense. It’s ridiculous that we’re even thinking like that. AB: I serve time with women who gave birth, while incarcerated, and the trauma of giving birth shackled and chained to a hospital bed with an officer in the room with you, as if you are going to pop out and run with a baby coming out of your body, as if you’re some type of threat in the midst of childbirth or your visits when you go to have your prenatal care—if you get prenatal care, let’s just say that, if you even get proper prenatal care—being handcuffed and shackled during those visits, just the thought of that experience just breaks my heart. And then we’re going to say we want to bring children into that culture for year. And I’m not advocating for extending that, but whether I snatch that baby out of that mother’s arms on day one, or day 366, I’m still snatching that baby out of that mother’s arms. If we allow women to care and nurture their children for a year—to just kind of emphasize and echo what Sashi said—if we said, “hey, it’s safe enough for you to do this with this child, so you are safe enough to have this baby around you for 12 months,” how then can we in the same breath, say that this person, this parent, is not safe enough to be in their community? I don’t understand that logic. It doesn’t make any sense to me. And then the harm on that family and especially on that child, like Maggie said, you could have—I can’t say we had six good COs—but you could have six good COs, but there’s always going to be the one who is bound and determined to harm you with words and action. They will denigrate your child just as much as they denigrate you. Again, just pointing out this cultural problem, architects cannot fix that [harm]. And here’s one of the main reasons why you can’t fix it, which is why you shouldn’t partake in it: the training. They train them [COs] using military training techniques and strategies. When you think about that, when we train our military, there has to be an enemy, right? So there has to be an enemy. Who do you think the enemy is, inside of our prisons and jails? Those that are incarcerated in those cages are, as a result of the training that they receive, are the enemy. And if you are the enemy, I don’t have to treat you as if you’re human, I don’t have to do things in a way that I would to someone that is not my enemy, right? Pretty will not change that rig…
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