The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The Iowa State Penitentiary is no ordinary prison. Unlike the eight other prisons with minimum- and medium-security levels, The Fort is an exclusively maximum-security facility. It houses the toughest cases, men with records of violence who are difficult to manage and pose the greatest escape risk. These inmates - a fourth of whom have serious mental-health issues - require intensive supervision. Some are serving very long sentences. Some who are serving life sentences will die there.

This prison should be designed, equipped and staffed in a way that provides a humane, secure and safe environment for all inmates and staff, of course. But it also should provide the proper environment and opportunities for those criminal convicts who will return to society to benefit from their time spent in the institution.

Thus, designing a new penitentiary is a rare opportunity to work from a clean slate and to create a maximum-security prison that could allow for fundamental changes in how inmates are housed, managed and presumably reformed.

The planning process is now under way. Fifteen teams of state prison workers and corrections officials are meeting with national corrections consultants and architectural firms. Those discussions will result in a written "program," which will describe how the facility will be used, from guard-prisoner interaction to how meals will be served. This is the most important part of the process because the program details will dictate the physical design and ultimately how the prison functions.

Old prison is inefficient, has been very dangerous

Whatever form the new penitentiary takes, it will be dramatically different from the current prison, which has occupied the same site on the west bank of the Mississippi River since 1839, seven years before Iowa became a state. Though the penitentiary has been expanded, renovated and modernized many times over the past century and three quarters, the original building - Cell House 17 - is still standing, though it no longer is used to house inmates.

Photographs from the turn of the century show inmates in long rows of barred cells, which are little changed from the cells used today. The stacked cell "ranges" - up to four levels of stone-walled boxes of roughly 50 square feet, with barred doors enclosing the open end - make management difficult, because guards cannot monitor inmates inside their cells without physically making rounds. Inmates move throughout the prison complex for all activities, whether it be for meals, classes, exercise in the yard or work details. This is not only staff-intensive, but dangerous.

At one point, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was some question whether the institution was run by inmate gangs or the guards. A riot in 1981 left one inmate dead and caused $1 million in damage, and the prison was put under federal court supervision for several years after a court ruling that conditions were "cruel and unusual."

Another wake-up call came in 1997, when a federal court ordered the state to provide better care for seriously mentally ill inmates confined to what was known as the "bug range," for the howling and banging inmates who threw feces and urine out their cell doors.

Although conditions have improved dramatically, two prisoners managed to escape four years ago by slipping away from a work detail and, taking advantage of a vacant guard tower, made their way over the wall. They were eventually apprehended, but the incident nonetheless shocked state leaders. The warden was replaced, and several major structural and procedural changes were made.
Design will determine how guards, prisoners interact

The impetus for replacing the penitentiary altogether came from a 2007 consultant's study of the state's overall correctional system, which also led to creation of a new system of classification that more precisely identified how many inmates belong in the maximum-security institution. Besides needing a huge investment in structural and mechanical improvements, the consultant concluded that a new prison would be far more secure and efficient to operate. State corrections officials have picked a site just north of the existing penitentiary near two prison farms operated by the institution.

There is much more to planning a new prison than arranging cells and guard towers, of course. Inside the walls of the Fort Madison prison is a Prison Industries plant, where inmates make and refinish furniture, a hobby-crafts shop and a small factory where cabinets and modular components are made for Habitat for Humanity home-building organizations in Iowa. There are classrooms for earning GED diplomas, space for treatment of drug and alcohol abusers and sex offenders, a library, a gymnasium and an outdoor exercise yard with baseball diamonds, tennis courts and weight-training equipment.

Those facilities are integral to the lives and rehabilitation of inmates. Just how they will be duplicated in the new prison is critical.

Also critical is a decision about how the inmates will be housed and managed by guards. State corrections officials envision a "pod" design, in which cells are clustered around common areas, where all meals are served and classes held without having to move inmates from place to place. This allows guards to directly interact with inmates and to see into all cells.

Beyond general concepts, prison officials are working on precise details of how the new prison should operate. Ultimately, these decisions will dictate not just how the prison is designed but how it functions, and more important, how it works for the lives of inmates.

There are many factors that dictate how effective prison will be for inmates, and the condition and operation of prisons is one important factor. Just as design of any building is an expression of the builder's vision, a new prison will be an expression of the state of Iowa for what it hopes to accomplish with the new penitentiary.
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http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090510/OPINION03/905100317/-1/OPI NION05&hl=en%3E