What Prison Design Says About How We Think About the People Inside

Published: Feb. 8, 2021, 5 p.m.

The Greene Space, the non-profit advocacy group Worth Rises, have launched a new series about the business side of the prison industry, everything from prison labor to companies who contract with prisons to provide health care, food and other services. Who profits when people get put away?

Up first, a conversation about prison design and construction with Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, Johnny Perez, the director of the U.S. Prisons Program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Raphael Sperry, a leader of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility, where he leads a national campaign to ban the design of spaces that violate human rights, and a board member of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, the first architecture and development firm dedicated to ending mass incarceration through building restorative alternatives.