Sound Planning

Do noisy correctional facilities make inmates more prone to violence? To what extent does noise hinder communication between staff or simply make staying alert more difficult? Are employee retention rates better in quieter facilities?

The answers to these questions have not been fully quantified in the kinds of studies upon which policy decisions are based, nor are they likely to be in the near future. While excessive noise has been shown to induce stress, the extent to which stress hinders operations is hard to pinpoint and prove.

The Committee on Acoustics in Corrections (AIC), an independent organization of leading justice architects, corrections administrators, and acoustical consultants, is working to address acoustics. Committee members report a renewed interest in improving the current noise standards used by the American Correctional Association (ACA).

One hurdle is correctional staff who don’t raise the issue to their superiors, wrongly accepting noise as part of the job, according to Knut Rostad. As the AIC’s managing director, Rostad helped conduct most of the few available prison-acoustics studies.

“At the outset, it was clear that most staffers didn’t realize that the acoustical environment was something that could be manipulated. It was just the way it was,” Rostad says of one study, which looked at three Wisconsin DOC housing units with different acoustic environments.

“When staff found the noise could be corrected, it quickly became clear in the louder housing unit that acoustic improvements were the most important action they’d like to take to improve security and safety,” says Rostad. “That was evidence that this issue was bigger than generally believed.”

Warden Judy Smith of the Oshkosh Correctional Institution also recalls her increased awareness in the wake of the 1994 study. “Inmates can be noisy and disruptive. We often look at noise as being part of our environment,” says Smith. “When the study came out, we were surprised that staff had so much of an issue with noise.”

Rostad says that while staff don’t think consciously about noise and are unlikely to present the issue of acoustics to prison administrators, the staff’s behavior tells another story. “On an operational level, in terms of staff assignments and where staffers wanted to work, it was apparently a key issue,” says Rostad. “When you think about the issues facing prison administrators, in terms of what they have to face on a day to day basis, it’s understandable that noise levels are pushed to the back burner.”

“It’s an interesting topic,” the warden muses. “How does noise shape what the staff do with inmates? And I think it does influence that. Because of the high number of inmates we have, staff look forward to times when we clear dayrooms, such as before meals. I know a lot of that is the noise factor. It gives them that break in the day to take a breath.”

Without comprehensive data on how the corrections community values acoustics, Rostad currently relies on personal testimonials, and says the issue is clearly gaining in recognition, as it is in other institutional environments, particularly schools.

One of Rostad’s favorite anecdotes came to him at a recent ACA conference. The administrator for a large metropolitan jail told Rostad that cost cutting eliminated some acoustical provisions from a new facility. The administrator stood his ground, saying he would not move into to the new jail without the planned acoustic treatments. The administrator won in the end, but this story isn’t typical.

“Most new jails today are designed with acoustics in mind. I would give the architectural community an enormous amount of credit, but when push comes to shove in terms of reducing costs, and when value engineering comes around, one of the victims frequently is acoustics,” says Rostad.

But cost concerns may be unwarranted in many cases. A study by RS Means, a construction-cost research data company, compared a security-acoustical system versus both drywall and plaster. When researchers looked at the efficiencies of one trade in the security-acoustical system versus the multitude of construction trades, they determined it was actually less expensive to include the acoustic measures.

Warden Smith admits it’s not easy to argue that acoustics should be a priority when budgets are tight. Nevertheless, she says she is always alert to opportunities. “Some of our changes probably weren’t done strictly because of acoustics, but it was certainly in the back of my mind,” Smith says, citing as an example a couple housing units with a cement floor. “Because of safety issues-people falling down-we put some tile floor covering down, but I also knew this would help because of the acoustics.”

“Older prisons have it worse, because it wasn’t that long ago that the products available were either very limited or very expensive,” says Rostad. “I think one thing we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that the products have gotten better and product costs have come down. But the damage of poor acoustics is not as well known in administrative offices as it is in the trenches. That’s part of what the Committee on Acoustics is seeking to remedy.”

Unfortunately, there is no good data to quantify the impact of noise levels in older prisons, though anyone in a large correctional facility is familiar with the constant inmate clamor. It is up to the correctional community to raise their voices about excessive noise in prisons and jails.