Designing for Today and Tomorrow
Roger Lichtman
Roger Lichtman of The Lichtman Associates architectural firm doesn’t want to push the corrections industry envelope. He wants to deconstruct the envelope, examine its creases, iron out its seams and determine if it is even necessary in these modern times.
With more than 25 years in criminal justice architecture and numerous correctional projects throughout the United States under his belt, Lichtman’s ideas — no matter how unbounded they might be — are grounded in institutional knowledge and experience. He has served as chairman of the American Institute of Architects Committee on Architecture for Justice, and he regularly speaks at conferences and classes.
Lichtman discussed planning methods for correctional facilities, working overseas and issues facing the corrections industry during a phone interview with Correctional News from his New Jersey office.
Correctional News: Your firm sometimes does initial design work at a client’s office. How is that beneficial?
Roger Lichtman: A few years back I came up with a slogan, “Listening is the most important task an architect can perform in the design and construction phase.” That is simply because all we are doing is creating a tool that will either enhance or impede the operation of a facility.
What has to happen is operations need to be driven by the operators so they’re not walking in and cursing out the designers because something was rammed down their throats later on during the process. That has to be measured against the backdrop of what is going on within the industry as a whole, which is a knowledgeable architect’s role in the process while still responding to the client’s needs. That’s what makes us architects and not secretaries.
CN: What is the best way for a client to figure out what is happening in the industry?
RL: The best tool is to go out and tour other facilities and talk to other operators. National Institute of Corrections is a great resource for clients. County clients can bring up to six members of their team to sit for a week and get a primer on how to design their jail and manage jail design construction. They can see the pitfalls, and the trials and tribulations, and examples of what other jurisdictions have been through.
I think it was Sy Syms who used to say, “An educated consumer is our best client.” It’s the same especially if you’re building a jail because it’s such a huge capital outlay in most counties that it behooves taxpayers to have their public officials and their administrators go out and learn how to be the best client they can be.
CN: It seems like the difference between a client that seeks training and does research and a client that does not can be pretty extreme in some cases.
RL: Another expression, “ignorance is bliss,” holds true here, too. If you don’t go out and explore, how do you know what else is out there? How do you know that what you are doing is the best way to go?
Here’s an example: About 20 years ago I was working for a firm that was hired to do a master plan of San Quentin [opened in 1852]. When we started to do the design interview process, a lot of the line officers started describing to us what they wanted — a new spruced up 1852 facility based on the same principle of what was built in 1852. Unless you go out and travel, that’s your total world. That’s the only perspective you have to bring to the table.
It helps to go out and tour, and you don’t need to tour big jails necessarily. A lot of sheriffs, when they have extraditions to other counties, will send members of their design team so they can spend an extra day and see one or two jails on that trip.
CN: When you are working with a client that hasn’t gone out and done research, is it sometimes hard to change that “1852” mindset?
RL: Yes, it often is. Of course, every now and then you run into somebody who is stubborn. For the most part, you can’t ignore education. Even if someone is stubborn, once they go and see alternative ways to run things and they go to NIC it’s hard to remain stubborn. You have to remain open-minded because everybody has problems in their existing jail if they’re building new. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need to build a new jail.
CN: Meeting tough deadlines is an attribute your company touts; what is the best approach for new construction when time is limited?
RL: In terms of scheduling, communication is the key issue. You can only push this process so fast, especially, given public bidding laws. Good communication and laying out a schedule upfront is the best way to do it.
We like to go open-book simply because I’d rather tell a client the design process is going to be done in a year and have it take nine months than tell a client that the design process is going to take six months — because that’s what they want to hear — and have it take nine months.
CN: You have done some work overseas recently. How was that experience?
RL: We started doing work in the Commonwealth of the Mariana Islands, which is a dot in the Pacific about three and half hours southeast of Tokyo.
Since it’s a U.S. commonwealth, they are subject to the same laws that we all are. The Department of Justice went out and inspected their jails, which were not up to standards. The government there wound up entering into a consent decree with the federal government, and then had to bring someone in to get the job done.
It was a wonderful project because we basically had to start from scratch in terms of defining a criminal justice system, which yielded a juvenile facility, a jail that HOK designed, holding facilities on several of the outlaying islands, and several other buildings.
We’re about complete on that project. I’ve probably got about five months worth of work just to wrap up with the Department of Justice to sign off on the consent decree. Beyond that, we’re done with construction.
CN: Were there a lot of logistics issues involved with that project?
RL: There were a lot of logistics issues. There were materials coming from Australia and China. We had laborers coming from the Philippines. There was clearly no room for OSHA on a project like this. We had tilers and guys climbing scaffold wearing flip-flops and straw hats. The guy laying ceramic tile would sit there in a squat position — I can’t sit like that at all. He would work like that all day laying tile. It was a great job just because it was so different.
CN: Shifting back to the United States, what issues are you seeing right now that are having a major affect on the corrections industry?
RL: Budgets are so tight right now, I think we’ve lost our way in terms of what it is that we’re trying to do in terms of incarceration at the prison level and at the jail level. We as a society for a long time weren’t able to define what is a prison and what is a jail. Obviously, you can look it up in the dictionary, but I’m talking in terms of how they fit in society and what it is we’re supposed to be doing.
Over the years that issue has been exacerbated in terms of building jails and prisons with minimal or no program space, whatsoever. We’ve created warehouses for human beings and now we are at a point where everybody — unless they are serving a life or a death sentence — is getting out. Because funding for operations has also declined there is even more incentive for early release so we can create additional bed space for “those who need it” opposed to those who “don’t need it.” We’re sending people back out to society and what have we done for them in terms of any meaningful skills or anything else?
I’d like to think that all of our jobs in corrections and detention are meaningful. Until we can define the role of incarceration at the state level or the county jail level we’re all sort of floating in limbo. I think that is a major issue.
CN: How have rising construction costs played a role in shaping planning for new facilities?
RL: We all know what’s happened to construction costs in the last three years. Between China and Hurricane Katrina, steel costs are soaring and concrete costs are following. We are seeing construction costs bloom. Some jurisdictions that were on the cusp of being able to build are being forced not to build. Those that have decided to build are building less.
But, it all comes back the question, “What are we trying to build?”
CN: You think the industry needs a complete re-evaluation?
RL: I really think so, and I think it’s been a long time since we’ve done that. We have come as close as we can to defining the perfect problem. We know so much about criminal justice — from jail design and construction to underlying issues such as poverty.
We could solve the problem and eliminate the need for jails and prisons. It would take substantial intervention and education. We know the target areas where we need to do this. It would cost billions, but in the long run it would save trillions. You wouldn’t see results for 15 to 20 years, but the problem is political and social shortsightedness.
It’s gotten very difficult at any level to sell anything in which a result is not within a quarter or a year, and some problems can’t be solved within a quarter or a year.
CN: What is the role of the corrections architect in all of this?
RL: As I said earlier, “we are architects and not secretaries.” If we were secretaries we would walk in and ask the client, “What is it that you want?” The client would tell the architect, and the architect would design it exactly how he was told.
The problem with that is it ignores the architect’s role in exposing the client to the backdrop to what is going on in the world and thinking beyond the box. Even though we are only designing the box, we need to investigate way beyond the boundaries of the box and come back in so we understand how that box fits within the criminal justice system. Otherwise, we might as well be designing million dollar homes for rich people. They don’t care what your opinion is they just want their bedroom looking over the mountain. We have a much larger role in terms of designing jails and prisons and a portion of this criminal justice system.
CN: Do you think temporary facilities are a viable solution for jurisdictions that have budget constraints and overcrowding?
RL: Fortunately, overcrowding is not as critical a problem as it has been in the past, when tent cities were sometimes used. The problem with temporary facilities is that they seldom are. Nobody wants to put something up knowing that it’s going to be destroyed in a short period of time.
I was called out to look at a women’s facility that was housing about 250 women in a temporary facility. It was modular trailers connected together that were all wood framed. A couple of years before they called me, the walls were falling apart and they decided to put a new façade on the trailer and tie it into the existing roof.
When I went to look at it, they wanted me to replace the roof. Since they put up new walls, they were asking me to put a new roof on the structure — in essence we were building a new facility around an old facility so we could tear out the modular facility from within. It gets to the point of being ludicrous. They spent more on a modular facility in this particular jurisdiction than they would have if they just built a new facility in the first place.
We need to ask, “Who are we housing in a modular facility?” If somebody is suited to live in a modular wood-type structure, why are they there in the first place? We need to examine our laws to determine if there is something else we can do with that population, such as electronic monitoring from home.
In some cases, modular facilities are needed for temporary stopgap. I would agree with that if the modular facility can be permanent construction, quickly built and used as a permanent facility. But I think modular facilities for temporary use are a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, quite frankly.
CN: You’ve called for broad re-evaluation and reform. What do you think is a good first step for the industry?
RL: We need some of the brightest minds in the corrections industry to meet with politicians to determine the overall purpose of incarceration.
We need to determine: who are we arresting? Who are we putting in jail and prison? What are we expecting when they come out? If money were no object, what would be the ideal jail?
Once we know the goals we are trying to achieve, we can set up intermediate steps to achieve those goals. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I think there is a lot more to it than bricks and mortar. Everybody at some point need to take stock of what they are doing.