Can You Hear Me Now?

With all due respect to mobile phone owners (of which I am one), this dufus-looking guy walking around asking some unseen someone if he’s being heard is both annoying and unimaginative. So why write an article about being heard? Simply stated, being heard is the foundation of communication. I will admit to the irony of my own technological devices when I own both a cell phone and sound-reduction headphones that pretty much eliminate communication at 35,000 feet. I promise to have a team of concerned therapists guide me through these dilemmas.

This question about being heard, however, is worth deliberation. Most of you have noticed that the jail and prison populations are ascending again, after three to five years of either a plateau or, in some instances, an outright decline. During this short respite from year-on-year increases in inmates, most states and counties experienced economic woes the likes of which haven’t been seen since the mid-70s. Little was done to improve confinement conditions as governments struggled to just provide basic services.

As the curve leads us back to the incarceration altitudes of the early 90s, most jurisdictions have little choice but to return to crowded, noisy dayrooms that do little to promote “normal” conversation that occasionally actually becomes communication. Having survived four teenage sons who all played “musical” devices, I have an awareness of the challenge of communicating through noise. Through bribery and a generous application of sound-absorbent material, we were able to keep the neighbors at bay until our boys transferred their talents to various university locations.

Most correctional administrators cannot simply transfer the noisy occupants nor convince stingy financial officers to approve sound reduction techniques in living areas. The American Correctional Association invests quite a bit of ink in promulgating standards for space (remember the Vitruvius man from the Da Vinci Code?) and natural light, but only provide two benchmarks for acceptable noise levels. While space and natural light are very important in satisfying the physical standards for accreditation, neither of these have much to do with communication.

Even in facilities with the most generous “out-of-housing unit” opportunities, inmates still spend at least 50 percent of their time in dayrooms or cells that, by ACA standards, should achieve noise levels of no more than 70 decibels (dBA) during daylight hours and 45 dBA at night. Some administrators and accreditation auditors have suggested that the noise standards are too arbitrary and too difficult to measure without sophisticated monitoring equipment.

Most of us don’t have a clue what 70 decibels sounds like. We just know when we can’t hear the person we are speaking to and we collectively continue to raise our voices to the point that we are no longer communicating; then we grow either disinterested, aggravated, disheartened, or all three. In any case, we essentially give up trying. Think about prison/jail dayrooms where decibels routinely exceed 70 dBA.

The Environmental Protection Agency said the average acceptable noise level in a classroom should be 35/40 dBA; 50 in a general office; 58 in a light industrial workshop. But in a prison/jail dayroom, 70 dBA according to the ACA standards is acceptable. That’s approximately twice the “acceptable” level in a classroom.

A study by environmental psychologist Dr. Richard Wener in a Wisconsin prison found that staff generally ranked noise as “a significant contributor to tension or stress,” and that staff concerns with safety, assault, and control tend to increase as acoustical treatment is reduced and noise levels as increase. In this study, staff rated reducing noise levels as more important than any other change, including more staff training.

As has been the case historically, when an issue regarding the standards is consistently brought before the ACA, one of the many committees is charged with the responsibility of producing credible research regarding possible solutions. Such is the case with the noise range (45-70 dBA). While a 1989 Committee on Acoustics recommended changes in methods of measurement and the acceptable ranges, these were not incorporated into the latest standards. The responsibility for additional study has now been assigned to an acoustics subcommittee of the Facility Design Committee.

Two issues require field-based research:

1. is the present range of acceptable noise levels quoted in the standards appropriate?
2. are decibels the appropriate measure for noise levels or should something more easily calculated be used?

Regarding the latter point, Jerry Christoff, managing principal of Veneklasen Associates, proposes the use of reverberation time as a more easily measured and accurate indicator of the quality of a space for “normal” conversation.

Acousticians familiar with prison environments recommend a 1.5 second or less reverberation time for dayrooms or dining rooms and 1.0 second for living units. A reverberation time of .75 seconds is good and over 1.5 is not. A good aspect of using reverberation time as the measure is that if you can clap your hands and count, you can get a pretty good idea of the time required for existing surfaces to absorb the sound. Currently, with decibels as the unit of measure, measurements are rarely made by correctional administrators or accreditation auditors since cumbersome equipment is involved.

Does noise in a prison environment really matter? Isn’t that just one of the “hard cheese” consequences of doing the time? Even if we walked stooped over, dragging our knuckles on the ground believing that “just desserts” equals noisy living environments, surely the staff who attempt to communicate instructions, advice, and encouragement in these spaces deserve a break. Frankly, the current condition in most correctional living areas is a fender-bender looking for a good lawyer.

The solution is not nearly so challenging as the measurement. Noise can be reduced through the application of sound absorbent materials as simple as carpet, fabric on furniture, sprayed-on or installed ceiling materials, among other inexpensive methods. Of course a reduction in human engineering efforts at communication such as public address systems announcing visitation (as if every inmate had somehow missed that at orientation) or officers bellowing orders across a crowded dayroom like a Pavarotti aria could also contribute to reducing noise-induced stress.

A trend that could be initiated with little cost could first be a recognition that our best chance at change in an offender’s life is communication and to then follow that simple principle all the way through the prison system, starting (or ending) with the ability to talk in a normal voice to another human being. Now that is a radical thought. Accepting that principle opens the door to many, many possibilities.

Stephen A. Carter, AICP, is principal of Carter Goble Lee LLC in Columbia, S.C. He can be contacted by e-mail, scarter@cartergoblelee.com. Additional information is on the company’s Web site, www.cartergoblelee.com .