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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Last month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the department of justice not to renew its contracts with private prisons.

Audio clip Joe Biden: This is the first step to stop corporation from profiting off of incarceration that is less humane and less safe, as the studies show.

Brian: The order effectively returns the US to an Obama era policy that had been overturned under former President Donald Trump, but while advocates have praised the move as a first step, many argue that more must be done to address the privatization of the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex.

That brings us to our segment today, which is the start of a new series in conjunction with the Greene Space and the non-profit advocacy group, Worth Rises. It's called Punishment and Profit and it's all about the business side of the prison industry. The question guiding this series is, who profits when people get put away?

Every Tuesday evening for the next 12 weeks, the Greene Space will hold a virtual panel discussion about one business sector of the prison industry, everything from prison labor, to companies that contract with prisons to provide healthcare, food, and other services, and we'll have a segment previewing those weekly Greene Space discussions on Mondays, here on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Up first, right now, we're going to talk about the buildings themselves, prison design and carceral architecture. Many of you have heard the city's plan of closing Rikers and building four new borough jails, so which architecture firms will design those jails, and what does the design say about how we think about the people inside and justice more broadly?

With me now are Bianca Tylek, Worth Rises executive director, Raphael Sperry, a leader at Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility, and a board member of Designing Justice and Designing Spaces, the first architecture and development firm dedicated to ending mass incarceration through building restorative alternatives. We also have Johnny Perez, the director of the US Prisons Program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. He is also a former incarcerated individual who has spent over 10 years in New York's jails and prisons. Welcome Bianca, Raphael, and Johnny to WNYC. Hi, there.

Speaker 1: Good morning. Glad to be with you.

Speaker 2: Good morning.

Bianca Tylek: Good morning.

Brian: Bianca, the series came about because of a report put out by your advocacy group, Worth Rises. Would you start and give us an overview of what the report seeks to spell out?

Bianca: Good morning. Thanks so much for having us this morning, Brian. My name is Bianca Tylek and I'm the executive director at Worth Rises. Our recent report, which we published out in December, is now the most comprehensive intensive report written about the prison industry. It is quite a long and detailed report which is very research-intensive, but I think what is also really important about the report is it's really accessible.

It's really easy to read and it covers the history of privatization in our prison industry. It talks about the business and the business model, including the corporations that are currently engaged in each sector, and finally and most importantly, it includes the impact and the stories of those that have been targeted and harmed by the prison industry.

The report covers the 12 sectors of the industry. As you noted, Brian, every week over the next two and a half months, we will be covering one of those business sectors which range, this week we are starting with architecture and construction, but we'll go to telecom and healthcare and transportation. In the report, there is a chapter dedicated to each one of those business sectors.

We'll be impacting those more and more with experts in this field over these next few weeks and hope that this is really the beginning of the public starting to understand when we say prison industry, that we don't just mean a handful of private prison companies, or even just prison labor that the $80 billion industry behind prisons that supports incarceration and community surveillance is quite massive. There's a lot of folks with interests and financial interests in that, from corporations to the government. Hopefully, this is the beginning of the public really starting to understand that.

Brian: Before we go to today's theme of architecture and design, can you give us a take on President Biden's executive order directing the Justice Department not to renew its contracts with private prisons? What do you think the effect of that would be on people currently incarcerated in those facilities, for example?

Bianca: That's a great question and I know one that a lot of people have been asking. This executive order went out, I think there was a lot of excitement, and then we saw a slight dip in maybe the stock prices of the big, few private prison companies, CoreCivic, the GEO Group, G4S. The reason for that is because it is really just the beginning. We applaud the Biden administration for taking a step, certainly, but we know that is really, really just the tip of the iceberg. The executive order released by the Biden administration is limited pretty substantially in its reach. It focuses on the phase-out of private prisons from contracts with the Department of Justice, which manages the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That's basically federal prisons.

Now, importantly, it only addresses the signing of new contracts, it does not address existing contracts, of which there are many that go quite a while, as long as a decade or so. Depending on how much work is done to bring this into legislation, that could also be reversed by a future administration. I think, secondly, it does not at all touch Department of Homeland Security and essentially the use of private prisons by Immigration Customs Enforcement, which is a substantial piece of the corporations business lines. it's important to know that private prisons, about 25% of their business or revenue lines come from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 25% come from Department of Homeland Security and ICE, and then 50% come from state and local jails. That's the last part that it also doesn't touch, is it doesn't address obviously the use of private prisons by state and local agencies.

All of those things are things that hopefully are coming down the pipeline, but certainly need to be addressed and we can't just look at this one executive order as the solution to private prisons in the US.

Brian: Just one more question in this thread and then we'll bring in Johnny and Raphael. For people who've had no contact with any kind of jail or prison and haven't really thought about this issue, why are public prisons better in your opinion, which obviously they are than private prisons? What, in general, are the biggest qualitative differences for the people who are incarcerated?

Bianca: I think the number one piece of the answer to that question is who has power and where transparency exists. I think the reality is we're not going to pretend that public prisons are good places to be or humane in any way. I think we're going to be talking a lot about that today and obviously throughout the course of this webinar series that we're partnering with the Greene Space on, but the reality is that when you have a publicly run facility, you have more-- The government and the people that it represents have more power and insight and there's more transparency into those facilities.

The answer is really twofold. One, they are in fact slightly better in terms of conditions, meaning public facilities and that's largely because-- The Department of Justice actually did a study, and part of what supported this executive order that Biden released, but it had originally come out under the Obama administration, was a study that revealed that private prisons are less humane even than public entities. Largely because use of force is higher in private facilities and a number of other factors.

Beyond that, as I was saying, we also have this transparency issue. You cannot issue a FOIA request or Freedom of Information Act request, to private prisons, and actually know how they're operating, know who they're using for their subvendors, in the way that you can for a public facility, and so we can hold our government officials accountable when it comes to running public facilities. We can't do the same thing with private facilities.

Brian: All right. Now to Raphael Sperry, a leader at Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility, and a board member of Designing Justice and Designing Spaces, an architecture and development firm dedicated to ending mass incarceration through building restorative alternatives. Raphael, welcome again to the program. In broad strokes, how does prison design and construction fit into the story of the prison industrial complex?

Raphael Sperry: Good morning, Brian. That's a great question. In broad strokes, we wouldn't have the gigantic system that we have today that's totally out of step with the rest of the world if we hadn't built more prisons and jails. Since the 1990s, the United States has built up thousands of facilities, and they're expensive, on per square foot basis. They're one of the more expensive building types to build and certainly to operate. It started with unjust laws creating mass incarceration through the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences, but those policies couldn't have resulted in the giant social catastrophe we had if we hadn't built all the buildings to house all the people that they targeted.

Brian: Here's a stat that really jumped out to me. Nationally, in the past decade, the jail population has declined by roughly 40,000, while the number of jail beds has climbed by more than 86,000. This big build-up of prison, building the prison construction boom, which people who are paying attention might think of as a 1980s and 1990s thing, is still going on even while the prison population is declining, as the [unintelligible 00:11:54] incarceration movement runs strong, and there's less crime?

Raphael: I think you're probably seeing two things there. One is that, one of the problems that a lot of people complained about during mass incarceration is overcrowding. Unfortunately, instead of finding ways to take people who aren't any public safety threat, which is most people who are in prison, and letting them live in their communities while dealing with some issues. One of the solutions that's been advanced for overcrowding is overbuilding and we've got 40 years of trying to do exactly that and we've actually never solved the problem that way.

I think that's one issue. I think the other issue is perhaps, there's a difference between jails and prisons. A lot of states have slowed down on the prison construction front, but jails which are run by cities and counties, they've been, I wouldn't say picking up the slack, but for instance in California where I'm based, when the state did what they call realignment, they basically pushed prisoners from the state level down to the county level, because there was some pressure to make state statistics look better.

They were like, well, nobody's really going to look into the counties. Then the counties went out and started building [inaudible 00:12:58] instead, and the state was actually funding them for that.

Brian: The key difference there is jails are for holding people who've been accused until trial, like Rikers Island is a jail. Prisons are after you've been sentenced to time after a trial or pleading guilty?

Raphael: Yes, exactly, and one of the ironies of the many of perversity of the mass incarceration system is that most people who are in jail haven't been convicted of a crime, so they're supposed to be innocent until they're proven guilty, but because counties tend to have less funds than states, they run their systems, their jails on a smaller budget. They don't provide as much staffing and training and so jails tend to have worse conditions than prisons, even thought the people in there haven't even been found to have done anything wrong.

Brian: Listeners, we can take some phone calls. Have you spent time inside a jail or prison, either because you were incarcerated inside one or because you work in corrections? What are aspects, and this is what we want for today on the phones. Call us if you have an answer to this question. What are aspects of the physical building that stuck out to you that you'll always remember? Is it how dark it was or how poor the ventilation was in certain areas?

Did you notice how physical design can encourage people to act a certain way, like how darkness can encourage violence, research has shown? If you've spent time in a jail or a prison, call in and tell us about the building itself, and how it informed or continues to inform your experience inside the facility. (646) 435-7280. If anybody wants to call in on those specific questions.

Let's turn now to our third guest Johnny Perez, director of the US Prisons Program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. Johnny, welcome to you again. You told our producer that COVID-19 has revealed to people how flawed prison design is, from a public health perspective. Can you talk about that a little bit to start out?

Johnny Perez: Sure. Thanks for having me. Yes, absolutely. Prisons are not designed for people to be able to socially distance. I think these cultural settings are, in many ways, just created and designed to fill as many people as possible. Now, here it is, we're in a situation where almost all the world is actually told to stay six feet apart, yet people inside not only lack the space, but also just are powerless in where they're actually placed in. What the department has done as a result of lack of architecture, and the lack of space to be able to separate or de-densify their prison communities, is that they are now responding with solitary confinement.

We've seen a 500% increase in the use of solitary confinement as a direct result of trying to contain COVID-19. Part of the work is trying to get as many people out as possible while trying to de-densify and separate the people that are there. I'll say sadly, so even those folks that are placed in solitary which is a punitive measure, now we're starting to get reports that even those folks are also contracted COVID-19, because some of these prisons and jails and carceral facilities are so archaic, that they don't have updated ventilation system, HVAC systems.

I mean, if you've never been to a prison, you'd know that many people actually communicate through the vents. Actually I don't have any data on that, I will say that. However, there's a strong reason to believe that that is one of the reasons people continue to contract COVID despite the fact that they're separated.

Brian: Let me come back to you in a minute and ask Raphael one last question, because Raphael I know you have to go. How old are solitary confinement cells in this country and have their designs changed at all in the past few decades, with advocates calling for reform?

Raphael: Solitary confinement was one of the first methods of incarceration that was used in the United States, famously in Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and that was built in the 1830s. Then by the 1890s, it really was a hellhole and everybody including the Supreme Court decided that because of the solitary nature of the place, it was driving people insane and it was unsanitary and unsafe, and they shut it down.

Then when we started being tough on crime, which was in a lot of ways a backlash to the civil rights movement as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow describes, solitary confinement was brought back, and the new generation design has its extreme, supermax design, which is a prison that's entirely solitary.

But even your average county jail or state prison has what they tend to call segregation or security housing unit, and the design is really extreme. It's very, very isolating. The whole point is to make sure that people can't communicate with each other in any way and so people really experience what you might call sensory deprivation as well as social isolation.

Brian: Do you think we're in a moment for a significant reform, Raphael, before you go? If so, for you as a designer, what would the best practice be in building prisons that most people might not think about?

Raphael: I do think we're in a moment for reform. I think that people are no longer willing to accept a lot of the excuses for racism that kind of have structured public policy and that have been a big driver behind being what's called tough on crime and the war on drugs and mass incarceration. The thing that's important to understand is when we want to end mass incarceration, it's not about making nicer jails or nicer prisons. It's about putting people in different settings, for one, so they're not run by the correctional departments that simply haven't been able to be reformed for 50, 60 years.

For two, because alternatives have much better outcomes for communities. For one, they're cheaper, but more importantly, they treat people humanely and they actually recognize the real problems that are going on and are finding real solutions. We can be designing centers for restorative justice, we can be designing spaces where people can deal with their mental health and substance abuse issues, which are rife in jails and prisons.

All the evidence shows that those things can't happen in the jails and prisons we have today and it's not about just, "Let's provide some more daylight, let's give people more comfortable environments and better food."

We need to start over with figuring out what's going wrong in communities, which is pretty obvious, and there's a lot of knowledge about what's going wrong, to then figure out what we can do right and doing that in a community setting rather than in a jail or a prison setting.

Brian: Raphael Sperry, architect, sustainable building consultant, human rights advocate, a leader of the group, Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility, among other things. Thank you for giving us some time today. We really appreciate it.

Raphael: Thanks Brian. It's been a pleasure.

Brian: Johnny Perez, let me move back to you. Having spent a number of years inside New York's jails and prisons and having talked about how design can inform a person's self worth. It's a simple and profound thought to link those two. How design can inform a person's self worth. Can you talk a little bit about ways that you experienced that connection?

Johnny: Yes, absolutely. That's a really good question. Just as a child experiences like through their looking glass self where they learn and internalize their place in the world, so do adults in prison who've been reduced to this childlike identity where they're rendered powerless and dependent for every single aspect of their lives on an individual. Specific to architecture, at 16 years old, I spent a year on Rikers Island, the third largest jail in the country.

It was the first time that I was ever placed inside of a human cage. The place was drab and devoid of vibrant colors, the place smelled unhygienic, filled with rodents, the mattress was no thicker than one inch thick. More important I wasn't even called by my name, I was called by a number. Placed in a cell with metal toilets that freeze your behind when you're sitting and you're frustrated. Lack of natural sunlight, music, plants, and yes, even devoid of human contact.

If my self worth was contingent on the environment, then it would tell me that I am worthless. That I'm not worthy of the things that I just recently mentioned. The scary part is that after a while, you actually start to believe this. You start to tell yourself, "Well, maybe I am just a criminal, maybe I am just an animal, maybe I am just--" You kind of take on the narrative of the person who's on the other side of the cell, in this case the correctional officer, sometimes even a correctional administrator.

I'm handcuffed during visits. I wasn't able to hug my mother as a kid. All during a time where a person is trying to figure out where their place is in the world. Later on as an adult, I saw many people, and even counseled and mentored and other men, who had internalized this self concept about what it means to be a prisoner. Later on, of course, that has harder consequences as an adult.

Brian: Daniel in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Daniel.

Daniel: Hi, good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I actually was in Limestone County Detention Center, which is a privately run prison operation that makes money off of the state of Texas. It makes money off of the federal government for ICE detainees, as well as ICE convictees, which is two completely separate conversations, and for federal inmates serving less than a year, basically people who were considered to be minimum security risks. I was there as an incarcerated individual. The gentleman on the phone is 100% correct. The design of the building itself, these buildings, if you've ever seen a garage door that you see on a typical bodega or something in the city, that corrugated steel. These buildings are built of that corrugated steel, in particular, over concrete.

There's literally no wall. There's no sunlight. There is limited access to the outside, to get outdoors, to get sunlight. You shower in the full view of 50 people. You take a crap, excuse my language, in the full view of 50 people. You urinate in full view of 50 people. You have zero privacy and you know what? It's not meant to be the Hilton, you're incarcerated, but basic human rights do not exist in private detention facilities. While they would tell the federal government that, okay, well these are the programs that we have in place for incarcerated individuals. We have access to a law library. I worked in the law library for $1.50 a day. $1.50 a day and I'm going to tell you, those things do not exist. The programs do not exist. They might on paper. That's what they get paid for, but they do not exist.

Then you take that one step further. If you are in a public prison, you can hold that prison accountable theoretically, as an inmate through the Prison Litigation Reform Act. You can file in a federal court. You cannot do that in a private jail or private prison, because they are immune from lawsuit by inmates. It takes someone from the outside getting that done. If you do that, it doesn't shift you to another one. They'll put you on the bus and they'll keep moving you, and moving you, and moving you, so that you can't actually contact a court, and they'll beat the hell out of you while they're doing it. I've seen it happen.

Brian: Daniel, thank you so much for your call and that firsthand experience. It is chilling. We're running out of time in the segment and Bianca from Worth Rises, I want to come back to you for a last very localizing thought, and that is about Rikers Island and the proposed replacements for Rikers Island. As you probably know, New York City has announced with much fanfare that it will cut the city's jail population in half, close Rikers and build four new, what they say will be more humane jails.

One in each borough except Staten Island. It's a $9 billion plan, and just within the last few months, that plan has hit roadblocks. A Manhattan judge effectively denied the building project in lower Manhattan saying they hadn't conducted enough community impact studies. I think there were design questions too, like I think these would be high rise jails, and are they any better than Rikers? Give us your take on this, and then we're out of time for the segment.

Bianca: Yes, thank you, Brian. Actually if I can share this with Johnny, because Johnny actually was instrumental in the Close Rikers Campaign, really here locally in New York. I think at the end of the day, we continue to ask the question, why are we continuing to build new prisons and jails? I've actually spent quite some time walking around Rikers and I can say it's an absolutely decrepit facility that needs to go.

The problem is that if you simply shift all of the things that exist on Rikers, one of which the biggest issues is the Corrections Officers Union, to a new building, you have done little to address the grave issues that are there on the island. I'm going to stop there just for a quick second and see if Johnny just for 30 seconds, before we hop off.

Brian: Specifically on the design questions, Johnny?

Johnny: One, I know that, I have strong reason to believe the designs don't include solitary confinement, but that doesn't mean that correctional offices can't use it. I'll respond in the form of a question. That means and I'll ask that, if Rikers Island closes tomorrow, is the NYPD still going to arrest people the day after? If the answer is yes, then we have to look at where these people are going to go and the spaces in which they're going to hold them in. The truth is Rikers Island is the worst, but some of these borough jails are just as bad if not even worse than those facilities.

Brian: We leave it there for now, with the Executive Director of Worth Rises, Bianca Tylek, and Johnny Perez, Director of the US Prisons Program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. They plus our previous guest, Raphael Sperry, will all be taking part in a panel at The Greene Space tomorrow night, that begins a 12 week series of panels on the private prison industry. If you want to see tomorrow's panel, you can sign up at thegreenespace.org. Johnny and Bianca, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been so informative. Thank you.

Bianca: Thank you so much, Brian.

Johnny: Thank you.

Brian: Brian Lehrer at WNYC. More in a minute.

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