An Architect’s Code

Roman Mars:
This is 99% invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
I swear to fulfill to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant-

[A MAN MUST HAVE A CODE, NO DOUBT.]

Roman Mars:
The fundamental ethical precept of medicine is that doctors first do no harm. This led the American Medical Association to adopt opinion 2.06 of the AMA code of medical ethics in 1992: An individual’s opinion of capital punishment is the personal moral decision of that individual. A physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution.” It goes on from there. Lawyers have an ethics code, journalists have an ethics code, so it shouldn’t surprise you that architects do as well. The relevant ethical standard from the AIA that we’re discussing is ES 1.4, Human Rights. Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.

Sam Greenspan:
A number of architects have taken a stance that there are some buildings that just should not have been built.

Roman Mars:
And they don’t just mean the ugly buildings.

Sam Greenspan:
That by design, they violate standards of human rights.

Roman Mars:
That’s our producer Sam Greenspan. He’s talking about prisons.

Sam Greenspan:
Specifically, prisons that keep inmates alone in cells with little to do and with minimal human contact. Inmates have names for these places — the box or the bing. On the outside, we know them as supermax or the SHU.

Roman Mars:
That’s SHU for Security Housing Unit.

Sam Greenspan:
Now, it’s up for debate as to whether or not the SHU is “solitary confinement.” Reason being, and this is something weird we found while researching the story, there is no legal definition for solitary confinement. The UN doesn’t have one, the Department of Justice doesn’t have one, and neither does the CDCR, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Roman Mars:
The CDCR maintains that no prisoners in California are kept in solitary confinement. They refer to the SHU as a “Segregation Unit.”

Sam Greenspan:
But a number of groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, do call the SHU solitary confinement. And there’s a lot of controversy surrounding one SHU at a Northern California prison called Pelican Bay.

Roman Mars:
Pelican Bay State Prison was designed by San Francisco-based architecture firm KMD. KMD declined to speak to us for this story but Jim Mueller, an architect with KMD who worked on Pelican Bay, did talk with Architect Magazine about the prison. He said, “The inmates have no contact with other inmates during the vast majority, if not all, of the day. They are only allowed out of their cells for very short periods of time for constitutionally required exercise periods.”

Sam Greenspan:
Life inside of a SHU means 22 to 23 hours a day inside of a tiny room 80 or so square feet.

Roman Mars:
Nancy Mullane, a radio reporter with “Life of the Law” managed to get access to the SHU in Pelican Bay State Prison in California. She went inside one of the cells and had an inmate, Robert Luca, describe the room.

Robert Luca:
Basically, it’s the cell — I don’t know what size, six by nine or six by twelve, whatever it is — and that’s your bunk is your living room. The center of it is your walking area and two steps to the right is your bathroom, pretty much.

Roman Mars:
The official measurements are actually seven and a half by twelve feet. It’s not a space that’s designed to keep you comfortable. But it’s not these architectural features that concern humanitarian activists and psychiatrists. It’s the amount of time many prisoners spend in that cell, alone, without any meaningful activity.

Terry Kupers:
Long-term solitary confinement which is either for months or years, or it goes on forever as in Pelican Bay, connected with absolute idleness. That is, the individual’s socially isolated to the extreme but also has nothing meaningful to do. This causes a human breakdown, this destroys people as human beings.

Sam Greenspan:
Terry Kupers is a psychiatrist who specializes in forensic work. That is, he’s an expert on the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. He served as an expert witness on more than 20 class-action lawsuits concerning prison conditions. He says there’s a whole litany of effects that solitary can have on a person.

Terry Kupers:
Massive free-floating anxiety, paranoid ideas, insomnia, depression, and suicidal thoughts are very prominent. Their eyes are destroyed because if you do not look at a distance for a long length of time, your eye deteriorates. They have concentration and memory problems, and I asked if they read and they’ll say, “No, because I can’t remember what I read three pages earlier.” Mounting anger and they almost universally report that they’re terrified that their anger will get out of control. They’ll be in more trouble and then they’ll have a longer term in solitary.

Sam Greenspan:
That’s just for a normal, stable person. For prisoners with a history of or predisposition to mental illness, solitary can bring on a breakdown.

Roman Mars:
Now again, there is no universally accepted definition of solitary confinement, and “Life of the Law” reporter Nancy Mullane says that compared to other prisons she has visited there are actually some good design elements in the Pelican Bay SHU. Inmates can get natural light from skylights outside of their cells, which drifts into the doors made of perforated metal. These porous doors allow for inmates to communicate with each other, even though there are no lines of sight to any prisoner from within the cell.

Sam Greenspan:
But on the other hand, cells don’t have windows. Inmates never get to see the horizon. The only time prisoners get to leave the cell is to visit the shower or the exercise yard. And the exercise yard is an empty, windowless room, not much bigger than a cell with 20 foot high concrete walls. And while many prisoners in the shoe have a cellmate, Terry Kupers says sharing a cell is often worse than being alone. So, if that’s not solitary confinement per se, you could call it a kind of binary confinement.

Roman Mars:
All of this taken together, some people call torture.

Sam Greenspan:
In 2011 Juan Méndez, the UN Special rapporteur on torture said anything over 15 days–

Juan Méndez: 15 days in solitary confinement is a human rights abuse. Now, various other commentators have said that means it’s torture.

Sam Greenspan:
15 days says the UN, is the point at which people in solitary can begin to have irreparable psychological damage.

Juan Méndez:
I don’t actually like the 15-day standard, some people fall apart in two days.

Sam Greenspan:
What Terry Kupers calls torture, happens in buildings specifically designed to maximize the isolation or “segregation” of prisoners for the duration of their time in the SHU.

Roman Mars:
So, if it is the ethical code of architects to promote human rights, what is their responsibility to the people who are incarcerated in their buildings?

Raphael Sperry:
In Argentina, the military regime tortured people in a former auto body shop. That was one of their big torture centers. I’m not going to– nobody’s going to say that the architects who designed the auto body shop or somehow responsible, or even that the car mechanics we just owned it are no, of course not.

Roman Mars:
This is Raphael Sperry.

Raphael Sperry:
But when solitary confinement is a practice that requires a certain kind of space, and when you’re specifying the space exactly for that and making sure that all the doors can be operated without, you know, seeing another human being, that the outdoor space it’s going to be one that’s occupied by one person at a time, that there’s nowhere for a group of people to actually be together so it just won’t happen, then that is a designed intent. When used as intended, human rights violations will result.

Sam Greenspan:
Raphael Sperry is an architect here in San Francisco and he’s the president of the group called ADPSR.

Raphael Sperry:
Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility.

Sam Greenspan:
A few years back, Raphael had been following the news from Guantanamo Bay and reading up on mass incarceration in the US. Not necessarily as an architect, per se, just as a civic-minded, social justice-oriented kind of guy. And then one day in 2010, he saw an article in “The San Francisco Chronicle” about the redesign of San Quentin Prison in California.

Raphael Sperry:
Yeah, “The Chronicle” actually ran a picture that was supplied by the corrections department that was the CAD model-

Sam Greenspan:
A kind of three-dimensional floor plan.

Raphael Sperry:
-of the execution chamber suite of rooms. And I was like, they’re using the same tools that I use to make residential additions for people, to make schools. Only this project is going to kill people. That was totally shocking.

Roman Mars:
Seeing the remodel of the death chamber was the catalyzing event. But you could argue that there’s a difference between designing a death room and designing a SHU. But Sperry views both as immoral and in violation of the human rights that architects swear to uphold. Raphael Sperry wants architects and the profession of architecture as a whole, at least in the US, to stop building SHUs or any structures that are designed for long-term solitary confinement or are designed to put people to death. He’s not talking about all prisons or jails, just the ones where isolation is baked into the physical structure like the AIA architect-designed SHU at Pelican Bay prison.

Sam Greenspan:
Pelican Bay State Prison is way up in Northern California near the Oregon border, hours from any major city. It opened in 1989 to house the so-called worst of the worst, suspected gang members and people who are seen to pose the greatest threat to officers and other inmates. It was modeled after a prison in Arizona and has since inspired the design for other prisons across the country, even buildings in Guantanamo Bay.

Roman Mars:
“Life of the Laws” Nancy Mullane had corrections officer Lieutenant Rick Graves describe his take on the purpose of the SHU when she visited Pelican Bay in 2012.

Rick Graves:
The key to making this design work in our favor is not just the design of it, but how it’s managed. And historically, Pelican Bay is done a very good job of managing the worst of the worst in the state. This prison was designed and built to manage 5% of the California prison population. Those were the 5% that were causing the majority of crimes in the other prisons throughout the state.

Roman Mars:
The way that Pelican Bay or any prison is managed is really the determining factor in what life is like for prisoners. The way these prisons are used isn’t the only way they could be used. Prison management could decide that SHU prisoners could be allowed to go outside of the building in a secure gated area or the exercise yard can be repurposed as a communal dining hall. We’re just making these up, as far as I know, these have never been considered.

Sam Greenspan:
But for Rafael Sperry, the key here is design intent. Pelican Bay is managed the way it is and prisoners day in day out are the way they are because that’s how architects imagine the place to work during the design process.

Roman Mars:
And Sperry along with the ADPSR, Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility, say it’s time to stop building the prisons that are designed for what he sees as solitary confinement or any other kind of torture or execution.

Raphael Sperry:
It would seem like the least that architects could do would say, to demonstrate our commitment to public health, safety and well being, is to say, when you enter one of our buildings, it’s not intended to kill you or to torture you.

Roman Mars:
Which brings us back to the rather minimal statement in the AIA code of ethics and professional conduct, ethical standard 1.4: Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.

Raphael Sperry:
That’s it. Human rights refers to the international system that is built up around the United Nations and strongly supported by these advocacy organizations-

Roman Mars:
Like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Raphael Sperry:
Human rights is not a term that United States Courts use and it’s not a term in US Constitution, it actually refers to something even bigger than that. They said members should support the US Constitution, that would be different.

Roman Mars:
Sperry and the ADPSR are petitioning the AIA to adopt a new clause in its ethics code: “Members shall not design spaces intended for execution, or for torture or other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement.”

Raphael Sperry:
And so, if you happen to find yourself in prison, you should know that because your prison was designed by an architect, you won’t be subjected to cruel, inhumane, degrading punishment or get killed there.

Sam Greenspan:
So far the San Francisco chapter of the AIA has recommended the proposal.

Roman Mars:
We should point out here that the AIA San Francisco was instrumental in the creation of 99% Invisible but it doesn’t give us any money or serve in any editorial function. We monitor ownership completely.

Sam Greenspan:
If the AIA national adopts this amendment, it will become part of the ethics code for all AIA architects, virtually every practicing architect in the United States.

Roman Mars:
Regardless of how you feel about prisons, whether we should rehabilitate people or whether we should lock them up and throw away the key, it’s important to keep in mind that these attitudes change over time.

Sam Greenspan:
From around the 1890s to the 1950s, the US had a really different take on prison. The emphasis was on curing or rehabilitating people from a life of crime. Granted, there were some really terrible things that happened in prisons during that time, but the emphasis at least was on getting prisoners to become productive members of society again. A big shift happened with the war on drugs which sent a lot more people to jail, and then there was the violence of the prison riots or uprisings that happened through the 1970s. So from the point of view of prison officials who are in charge of jailing these populations, locking people up in their cells for most of the time started looking like a good option.

Roman Mars:
Hence the SHU, but when you create a building with a very extreme design intent with little variability, you’re locking prisoners into that current mindset for the lifespan of the prison. Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison in Illinois, was closed in early 2013 to make up for a state budget shortfall. It turns out housing a SHU prisoner is nearly twice as expensive as housing a general population inmate. Widespread budgetary pressure and possibly the influence of anti-solitary confinement activists is also causing state governments to reduce the number of supermax prisoners in Mississippi, Maine, and Colorado. Raphael Sperry may find he has a strange and powerful ally in his fight to stop architects building supermax prisons, and that is broke state governments. But even if supermax facilities fall out of fashion, Sperry says it’s still important to establish ethical guidelines that distinguish architects as a profession.

Raphael Sperry:
It’s professional ethics that set a profession aside from other occupations. When you join a licensed profession, your group has a monopoly to provide services in that sector. Not anybody else can be an architect and in fact, one of AIA’s big activities is patrolling people who are holding themselves out as architects but aren’t actually architects. In exchange for the public monopoly that we get as a group, we as a group have to adopt professional ethics that put the public interest first. And the way that we do that is the way, for instance, that doctors do that. Is to say, we’re not going to do anything to injure any of you intentionally.

———

Roman Mars:
This episode of 99% Invisible is a special co-production with the podcast “Life of the Law.” You can hear their show at lifeofthelaw.org. This story was produced by Sam Greenspan, Nancy Mullane, Kaitlin Prest, Julia Barton, Shannon Hefferman, Ashleyanne Krigbaum, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at @romanmars but we’ll have loads of more information and a link to “Life of the Law” at 99percentinvisible.org.