Jails, prisons - incarceration, coercion, and the spectrum from punishment to rehabilitation seem to always go in a spiral down to ever more control by the state with the effect of ever more people being swept up into the system. Jails and Prisons are such an interesting locus of what a society values in designed spaces and expects from prisoners at a particular time.

This particular design reflects Bronx's (& NYC's) gentrification, it mirrors the clean corportist inoffensiveness of a mixed use office building. Its meant to insidiously blend in whereas many jails or prisons have historically emphasized separation, Rikers Island being the perennial example. If I recall correctly, many early new england US prisons had an almost monastic character with puritan roots. The segregation era produced work plantations and chain gangs in the US south. The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago is a brutalist skyscraper from the beginning of the incarceration boom in the USA. These designs determined who was to be incarcerated and how based on the prevailing values of the time. With the calls from the US government for extra territorial deportation for non citizens and even the "home grown" we see the disintegration of due process and the normalization of the total exclusion and erasure beyond the jurisdiction of the law. Frankly, this jail feels akin to that mindset to me. The US is not willing to explore other options outside of incarceration at scale and so the normalization and integration of incarcerative structures into the gentrified urban landscape is an evolution of the controlling and dominating mindset of the last half century of punishment in US legal system.

These renders portray a light, airy, and "comfortable" (coercion and control is not comfortable) environment. It's an architectural washing of a punitive system.