Eva Fedderly writes about architecture and culture for Architectural Digest and was previously on staff at Courthouse News, where she covered high-profile lawsuits. Her narrative nonfiction book These Walls, published in 2023 by Simon and Schuster, combines her two beats: architecture and the legal system. Claudia Yoon, a recent AN intern, spoke with her about justice architecture and the role architects play in designing equitable incarceration and rehabilitation spaces. Claudia Yoon (CY): What drove you to be interested in the field of justice architecture? Eva Fedderly (EF): I come from a family of architects and attorneys. As a child, my family frequented downtown Manhattan, and driving in to the city, my attorney father often pointed out the men’s prison in Newark. He’d tell us about the architecture, noting the window slits allowing little sunlight into the small cells where people were caged. I had a nascent understanding of how architecture can be designed to oppress and to punish. As a journalist at Courthouse News, my time was spent inside courthouses around the American South, where I got to know the daily rhythm of the legal system. I also freelance for Architectural Digest, where I write about culture, design, and established my beat on justice architecture. When I learned of New York City’s Borough-Based Jails plan, I was fascinated by the question: Can we really use new design to help solve America’s mass incarceration problem? This was the germ of These Walls. These Walls in part engages with the history of Rikers Island jail complex. (Courtesy Eva Fedderly) CY: What are your thoughts on recent efforts to reframe jails and prisons as rehabilitation facilities? Do you see these efforts as genuinely transformative, or are they falling short? EF: There’s a big trend in justice architecture—the industry dedicated to designing prisons, jails, courthouses, and police stations—to redesign prisons and jails as “more humane.” Over the last 50 years, the United States experienced what the Los Angeles Times’s former architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in 2013 posed as “the most carefully hidden building boom in American architectural history”: Since 1973, the number of prisons increased from 600 to about 2,000, not including today’s 3,116 local jails. During this time, as justice architect Frank Greene told me, “There was a whole type of architect and company, including private companies, who wanted to bang this stuff out like sausage, where no one cared about the impact on people who were being incarcerated.” Over roughly the last decade, there’s been a shift in rhetoric to emphasize “more humane” correctional design. The AIA’s members-only justice architecture group, the Academy of Architecture for Justice, featured such conference themes as Architecture for Social Justice and Designing for Change: How Architects are Transforming the Justice System. Now we’re seeing places like New York City, Atlanta, and San Francisco investing in new, “more humanely” designed correctional facilities. While these buildings may offer more sunlight, softer materials, larger sleeping cells, and more programming space, they do not address the fundamental issues rooted in America’s criminal justice system. America has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates and one of the highest recidivism rates. It can be said that the system is a business in which keeping bodies inside these walls generates profits for multiple industries. Racism is baked into the justice system: At Rikers, for example, nine out of every 10 people incarcerated are Black or Hispanic. I conducted over 100 interviews with people affected by the system in some way. Many agreed that erecting new jails will not fix the problems. A collective understanding emerged: Creating new jails is putting lipstick on the pig. We need a new system of justice that is less costly, less harmful, and more effective at keeping society safe and helping those who are locked up to not break the law again. CY: These Walls highlights lessons the U.S. can learn from other countries, such as Portugal’s approach to the drug epidemic and Norway’s lack of stigma around people who are locked up. Do you think this is feasible in the U.S.? EF: There is not a one-size-fits-all approach that can be applied. Other nations, such as Norway and Portugal, are not the same as the United States: They have different populations, demographics, politics, resources, social services, systems, stigmas, laws, leadership, and histories. Certainly, we can learn from other countries and gain ideas and inspiration. These two countries embrace the concept of a welfare state, where citizens have free access to healthcare, education, and other essential services, prioritizing the overall well-being of society. In these nations, reducing the number of people in prisons is in society’s best interest. As a result, these countries are motivated to develop effective strategies to minimize incarceration, recognizing that high incarcerated populations are neither beneficial nor sustainable. The U.S. is one of the only two countries in the world who uses a cash bail system (Philippines is the other), where people who can’t afford bail are forced to serve as human collateral as they wait for their court dates in a legal system rife with delays and bureaucracy. It is extremely costly to incarcerate people. The cost of holding a person for one year in a New York City jail costs $556,539. America is vast. Each town, each neighborhood, even each block has its own challenges, threats, and motivations. We need to address issues of violence and harm on a local level: Where one area may need a job-training facility, library, a community center, and after school care, another neighborhood may need an addiction center, affordable housing, and more teachers and jobs. There is a phenomenon called “million-dollar blocks.” Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research and its Justice Mapping Center found that areas with high arrest rates tend to be neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. But by another measure, they can be some of the more costly neighborhoods. These areas can have so many arrests that taxpayers end up spending over a million dollars per year to incarcerate multiple people from these blocks. The dollars could be better invested in these areas to help prevent crime, violence, and incarceration in the first place. And to create spaces that help people address why they committed violence and correct it so that it does not happen again. CY: In These Walls, you critique individual justice architecture firms. What pressing challenges or ideological shifts do you believe these firms must confront? EF: Today, the firms that typically design prisons and jails are large corporate entities owned by outside interests and investors. This structure can diminish individual accountability, as a goal is often to prioritize the interests of investors over broader societal or ethical considerations. Many professions, such as the legal, medical, and psychology fields, have ethical codes. So too does architecture. Architects have a duty to ask themselves: Where do I draw the line? Would I design solitary confinement cells? execution chambers? cells the length of coffins? Should I use hard and nonabsorbent materials that cause irreversible hearing loss to those inside? The AIA’s largest and oldest chapter in its local New York chapter. Its members took a strong stance in a 2020 statement: “We are calling on architects no longer to design unjust, cruel or harmful spaces of incarceration within the current United States justice system, such as prisons, jails, detention centers, and police stations. We instead urge our members to shift their efforts towards supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies based on prison reform, alternatives to imprisonment, and restorative justice.” That same year, after years of pressure, the AIA updated its Code of Ethics to prohibit members from designing spaces intended for torture, execution, and solitary confinement. CY: Are there any rehabilitation projects in the U.S. that you might be able to cite as examples for how to engage with this topic in a positive way? EF: Architects like Deanna Van Buren and her firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces do not design jails; instead, they design restorative justice facilities, such as Restore Oakland in California. As Van Buren told me, “You can’t reform a system based on racism.” Other restorative justice programs, such as Common Justice in Brooklyn, cites a 6 percent recidivism rate, compared to the national recidivism rate of 76.6 percent.There are opportunities to design spaces for restorative justice practices. The cost to use restorative justice is significantly less than locking someone up, and more effective than incarceration. Megafirms can offer pro-bono design work in communities, to help local areas thrive. Individually, architects can design larger libraries, more adequate housing, green spaces, mental health care facilities, addiction treatment facilities, and safe spaces for communities to have access to therapy, job training, and free programs for kids and teenagers. The Tombs is a jail facility located in Lower Manhattan. (Eva Fedderly) CY: What do you think about New York City’s Borough-Based Jail Project? EF: At least 38 people have died on Rikers Island since Mayor Eric Adams took office. Since I began writing These Walls, the population there has doubled. Though New York City is mandated by law to close all jails on Rikers Island by 2027, the city’s budget director revealed in March that this date would not be possible. Mayor Adams says he will create an executive order to allow U.S. Immigrations and Enforcement agency to operate on Rikers Island. Meanwhile, the cost of the new jails in the boroughs skyrocketed from $8.6 billion to $16 billion. Pouring billions of dollars into new jails ­continues this broken system and cycle of harmful and costly incarceration. We need other forms of justice, more structural and societal improvements outside these walls to help communities thrive and prevent violence and arrests in the first place. Some say the Borough-Based Jails program will build the new jails in the boroughs, while also not closing Rikers, which will create more space to incarcerate people, particularly those who have not been convicted. CY: Some argue that architects have limited influence compared to legal professionals or policymakers in reshaping the justice system. How would you respond to this, and what power do architects hold in this conversation? EF: Architecture plays a powerful role in society. It reveals a society’s values. For instance, when I reported for Courthouse News, the courthouses tended to be the most preeminent, costly structures in small southern towns, revealing where budgets and priorities lie. But social mores shift, and architecture reflects that change. It’s crucial that architects understand the repercussions of what they choose to design—or not design. As the late architect and critic Michael Sorkin wrote in The Nation in 2013: “Because buildings have uses and frame and enable particular activities, their ethical aspect is inevitable by simple association.” Over the last 20 years or so, thousands of architects signed pledges that they would not design prisons or jails. When architects engage with those who will interact with their buildings, the exchange can have profound effects on design. Involving the local community to weigh-in can create a sense of shared responsibility. Architects can choose to take on projects like restorative justice centers, libraries, nonprofits, and spaces for free programming, addiction counseling, anger management, and job training, places that prevent people from committing violence in the first place. CY: Are you optimistic about the future of justice architecture? If so, what trends or projects give you the most hope for transformative change? EF: I am optimistic because, as history reveals, architectural trends and social traditions change. Styles of punishment and ways of dealing with crime and violence change. Even the definitions of crime and what is qualified as a crime changes. The second chapter of These Walls focuses on this change. Only 200 years ago, America saw the first full-blown penitentiary open its doors. Architect John Haviland designed this neo-Gothic structure for incarcerated people to live in solitude, pray, and find penance; thus the penitentiary was born. After the Civil War, the 13th amendment allowed slavery to be legalized inside prisons, and America experienced a boom in prisons and jails. Today, cities are designing “more humane” jails. I hope more advocacy and awareness will reveal a justice system that is broken and ineffective and that people will establish new ways to deal with violence and harm, such as effective reentry programs, housing, and prevention programs that stop violence before it occurs. More architects can prioritize designing libraries, schools, restorative justice facilities, addiction treatment programs, and other services outside of jails, that shift our priorities toward recovery, rather than punishment. When I first started These Walls, there seemed to be many conflicting opinions on how to move forward with justice. I listened to incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, abolitionists, architects, jail and prison volunteers, family members, law enforcement officers, and members of the community. I soon realized that these voices were singing in harmony; it just required a more attuned ear. In a nation that can feel divided, justice reform is bipartisan: People with diverse experiences and different political beliefs agree that the justice system needs to change. Many feel that incarceration doesn’t work as crime prevention. If it did, the United States—for what it spends and the amount of people it locks up—would be one of the safest countries in the world. We need structural and societal improvements outside these walls, to help communities thrive, to prevent violence and arrests in the first place. And we need places where people can go when violence does occur, instead of using jails as the solution.