Real World Juvenile Design

A lot more goes into juvenile facility design than meets the eye. Attention must be paid to size, space, movement and gender-specific needs to create a successful rehabilitative environment. Erecting walls and topping them off with a roof is not enough.

One of the most crucial elements in juvenile facility design is the creation of a normative environment that mimics a home or dorm-style setting. The more “real world” the environment, the better residents behave and the more rehabilitative it is, say experts.

“An environment speaks to you,” said Shelley Zavlek, president of Justice Solutions Group, a company that specializes in planning programs, services and detention and correctional facilities for adults and juveniles. “When an environment says, ‘you’re a bad kid’ and anticipates you’re going to ruin it, that’s the behavior you’re going to get. If this environment is respectful of you, it sends such a strong message. An environment cues behavior. It sends the message that you are valued, and you’ll respect that environment.”

Creating a normative environment involves placing movable tables and chairs in the dayroom so that residents can arrange them to create spaces where they feel comfortable having private conversations or socializing (experts caution, though, that the furniture must still be heavy enough to preclude it from being used as a weapon or light enough to be harmless if used as such). Designing the facility to allow for ample natural light is also an important element in creating a normative environment, with the provision for natural light in each bedroom and in program spaces being crucial.

Experts also agree that using ordinary carpets and furnishings and a residential color palette rather than their institutional counterparts creates a positive environment for treatment, as well as allowing staff to use the building to teach residents responsibility. “Housing youths in a facility they must care for and respect keeps them from lapsing into the bad habits anticipated by a more institutional, security-grade environment,” wrote Zavlek in a paper on developing facilities for juvenile female offenders.

“Over a long period of time, people have come to the conclusion that the best way to get kids invested is to create an atmosphere of expectation and normalcy,” said Mike McMillen, a justice design manager at Justice Solutions Group. “One that says, ‘we want you to cooperate and be part of a team to make good things happen.’ You do it by providing light, by being able to move furniture, through color, materials, textures and different-sized spaces,” he said.

Another way to create a normative environment in juvenile facilities is designing the structure to allow for movement  — residents must move all over the facility to engage in their various day-to-day activities. This is a sharp departure from adult correctional institutions, where the practice of “unit management” — in which all activities, such as eating, showering, exercising and relaxing, are done in one area — is the norm.

“The idea of movement is a big difference between the two,” said Peter Krasnow, also a justice design manager at Justice Solutions Group, as it is recognized that children need massive amounts of movement in their daily lives to maintain the feeling of normalcy.

“It’s about creating an environment that creates the highest likelihood of success,” said Zavlek. “You can’t create a completely abnormal environment for kids and then expect them to go back outside and behave normally. Normalizing the environment for youth is very important.”

Because engaging the staff is considered much more vital on the juvenile side than on the adult side, building small housing units of eight to 10 residents is also vital in juvenile facilities, says McMillen (adult facilities typically house 48 inmates per unit). “Experience says staff can interact well with 10 kids and engage them, but if you have 20, staff withdraw a bit and kids run the institution.”

The ideal of small housing units is taken a step further when designing facilities for youth with mental health disorders. Many detention and treatment centers house juveniles with multiple diagnoses within the general population. McMillen says one agency he worked with built a special facility just for youth with mental healthcare needs that featured even smaller housing units of four residents each, large windows for natural light and a colorful design palette.

“It was very different from a design perspective,” said McMillen. “But after operating for a while, they didn’t have any significant behavioral-related problems that they had when they were dealing with them in a general facility.”

The key to effective therapy-related design, he adds, is to “just turn it up a notch — small groups, connection to the outside, keep people busy. Those seem to be the key elements.”

Zavlek, meanwhile, touts the inclusion of rooms and spaces that may seem to serve no functional purpose but which add to the rehabilitative environment in less tangible ways, such as a dedicated chapel in a facility she helped develop in the Bronx neighborhood of New York that was a big hit with residents and circular spaces in facilities designed for Native American youth.

“I do think there is some therapeutic value to a room that speaks to healing and spirituality,” she said.

The extra care that goes into juvenile facility design is sometimes criticized as being “too nice,” continues Zavlek. She relates a story of a girl living at the Bronx facility: “I found my value here,” the girl told her. “We’re human too.” In a facility less geared toward normalcy and rehabilitation, she may not have come to feel that way about herself.

When it comes to juvenile facilities designed for girls, relationships are a paramount consideration. “Studies show girls need relationships,” said Zavlek. “They need to interact and talk. Everything is about relationships. That’s therapeutic and very important for girls.”

So incorporating design elements that facilitate the development of relationships among residents, between residents and staff, and between residents and their family members when they come for visits receives special attention in female facility design. Providing furniture that can be moved to create a setting conducive to conversing in small groups is one strategy. Another is integrating the dayroom with the rest of the housing unit to make interaction easier.

Designing for relationships must also take into consideration that many juvenile female offenders are teen mothers, and family visiting rooms should be designed with the aim of fostering the relationship between resident mothers and their children. Designing the space in such a way that allows for positive interaction between mothers and children, and which includes child-sized chairs and toys, helps achieves this. “The room should also be large enough to accommodate visitors and ensure privacy for families who wish to talk about difficult issues with facility staff,” writes Zavlek. In addition, the room should allow for easy access to restrooms with baby-changing tables.

Zavlek also says it is important to provide small, private, conveniently located rooms, where residents can talk privately with staff after they have returned from a phone call or a visit with family, which can often be a stressful or upsetting encounter for the girls.  

Designing living spaces for girls with relationships in mind is a little less straightforward, however. While some evidence suggests that double occupancy bedrooms can be beneficial by allowing residents to build a new and close relationship and, in turn, foster a sense of community, double rooms can also be dangerous if the occupants do not get along. Because of this, the trend in juvenile facilities is toward single rooms, says McMillen. In facilities that do have double rooms, staff must make case-by-case decisions on whether to house girls together and with whom.

Privacy is also an important consideration in a girl’s facility or wing. To provide privacy while still allowing staff to keep watch over the girls, opaque shower curtains are usually hung in front of multiple shower units and doors in bathrooms. “Girls can be made to feel that there is something giving them privacy from the watchful eyes of staff, while giving staff the ability to observe what they must for security reasons,” Zavlek writes. Curtains on bedroom windows help achieve the same sense of privacy while still letting in natural light and allowing staff to monitor residents.

Creating a female-friendly environment also means including additional amenities to allow girls to groom themselves, such as bathtubs and additional sinks, toilets, mirrors and outlets for blow dryers or curling irons, as well as making grooming areas larger.

“Girls have different hygiene needs,” Zavlek said. “Taking care of yourself and grooming is much more important to girls than to boys.”

And McMillen says that a hair care station installed in a female juvenile facility in Colorado not only took care of the girls’ grooming needs but also resulted in increased interaction and the creation of community.

Smaller, more intimate juvenile facility design that provides for community, relationships, normalcy and rehabilitation should be the future of juvenile design, says Zavlek. “When money was flowing in the correctional construction business 20 years ago, we had California building 1,000-bed facilities for youth,” she said. “Today, California is closing down those facilities and rethinking that whole system. I hope if the money comes back [to the correctional construction industry], we won’t go back in that direction.”

“Everyone has to realize we lock up too many kids, and there has to be a better way of doing business,” continues Zavlek. “We need to know what is driving kids into the system and the most effective and least restrictive appropriate [facility design] response.”