Ethics, architecture and prison design - a primer

Abstract

After some decades of neglect, the importance of prison design on well-being, rehabilitation and reintegration has been gaining acknowledgement over the past years. In parallel, there is growing interest in prison studies and rising awareness in new penology to seek alternative understandings to counter the dominant rationale that focuses on efficiency and surveillance. However, the ethical underpinnings of prison design remain underrepresented in architectural theory. This paper argues that, given that one’s ethical view on punishment is relevant to guide deliberative design choices, architects have the responsibility to critically engage and contemplate the ethical foundations of prison designs. The paper explains the ethical nature of architecture and design briefly and then turns to how we can make sense of the practice of punishment as a moral and symbolic practice while recognising concerns about its moral justification. The paper suggests that, in order to morally justify the practice and to make it symbolically intelligible, we need a concept of detention that is radically oriented at rehabilitation. By way of illustrating possible design responses, the paper refers to the Belgian case of the twenty-first-century detention houses. Intended as a primer, this paper considers the relation between ethics and architecture and aims to show the inevitability and relevance of ethical reflection to architectural design by focussing in particular on penal design. The paper aims to enrich the debate on penal design and to invite further reflection but does not intend here to expand the notion of penal design, nor to exhaustively engage or list different forms of penal designs and their ethical status or meanings.