Sustainable Design and Paradigm Shifts Within Corrections
By Brooke Martin & David Evers
Implementing sustainable design principles within correctional facilities serves to interconnect justice with individual and societal wellness that positively impacts the built environment. These design decisions are evidence-based and incorporate social norm principles leading to improved outcomes for staff, residents, inmates, and patients. Sustainable justice interconnects environmental principles frameworks of human rights, equality, empathy, compassion, and fact-based decisions that impact the built and natural habitat.
Photo Credit: Dewberry
In correctional facilities, the social environment is built by social norms that create the expected culture that staff, residents, inmates, and patients must follow to feel a sense of belonging rather than exclusion. Social norms are typically defined1 as “the informal rules that govern behavior in groups and societies.” These governing behaviors help provide direction in social landscapes and interactions and impact design. Social norms are rudimentary, like shaking hands, greeting others, expecting personal hygiene in a professional environment, being punctual, granting personal space, and providing privacy in public restrooms.
Social norms can also describe characterizations such as, “More than 70% of people in U.S. jails and prisons have at least one diagnosed mental illness or substance use disorder or both.”2 Social norms can also prescribe behavior or state what people think someone should be doing such as, “Mental and behavioral health services should be provided to justice-involved persons daily or weekly in-person within the secure facility vs. online or offsite to build and sustain wellness.”
Social norms can also influence populations with detailed information on change within that culture or society, such as “In conversations with front-line criminal justice professionals, people often ask, “Why don’t they just get help?” This is usually in reference to individuals who cycle in and out of the criminal justice system due to symptoms of mental illness. For those who are less familiar with the failures of our mental health care system, it can be difficult to understand the number of barriers to care people with mental illness face… …Changing federal policies, such as allowing Medicaid to provide coverage to people who are incarcerated, can support people with mental illness from becoming disconnected from their care while incarcerated. It can also provide access to services once they are released that prevent them from becoming re-incarcerated.3 ”
It is important to create healthy and normative social norms within correctional environments to influence healthy habits, decision making, and a culture of wellness. This is foundational for success of treatment programs, services, skill-building, and behavioral change as well as positive staff role models. Health is a key component of sustainable justice.
Transforming Correctional Culture and Care Through Impactful Design
A transformational paradigm shift requires cultivating positive social change by understanding what people are currently doing, determining what they should be doing through evidence-based research on design and programmed services, and illustrating how behavior has been changing based on those metrics – in essence, creating sustainable social norms supported by intentional design.
Communities are formed and influenced by their built environments, practiced operations, and evolving treatments and programs, which is seen in evidence-based applications. In the case of corrections, this process can be viewed through the lens of how a design supports the built environment and humanity as a whole. The following spaces and design elements contribute to wellness:
- Fitness areas
- Walking/running tracks or paths
- Separate exterior staff and resident/inmate/patient secure courtyards
- Natural daylighting in all areas
- Biophilia wall coverings and directed exterior views
- Comfort controls for lighting and temperature
- Circadian rhythm lighting integration
- Decompression spaces for staff and calm/mindfulness spaces for residents/inmates/patients
- Individual, gender-neutral restrooms
- Singular, shared staff locker area with adjacent individual gender-neutral restrooms
- Dining options with a variety of nutritious and lifestyle options
This may beg the question, won’t this cost more? The answer is, not always. Reduced recidivism, restoring people to become productive members of society, and imploring sustainable design can lead to time and cost savings via operational efficiencies.
Resilience and Sustainable ROI Through Architectural and Engineering Design
Resources, operational and staffing costs, and overall project budgets can be offset over the long term through building performance. Designing a facility’s systems should be based on life-cycle data, estimated costs, and grants that offer paybacks. The sustainability and effectiveness of the design are heavily impacted by where the site: how the facility is positioned on the site and how the exterior envelope is designed.
Design and construction industries are quickly advancing toward decarbonization through energy code and legislative requirements. As a result, carbon emissions are becoming the measure of desired performance and return on investment (ROI). Since secure justice facilities are large energy consumers, sustainability takes on greater importance in design and operation decisions. It’s important to note that resilience remains paramount and complementary to sustainability. Since secure facilities house vulnerable populations in strictly controlled spaces without free egress, a reliable utility infrastructure is imperative.
High-Performance Design Begins with the Building Envelope
A tight, well-insulated envelope—along with proper testing—leads to optimal building performance, resulting in lower energy bills and reduced mechanical and electrical system costs. After accounting for the building envelope, the next focus should be on heat recovery systems. Due to these facilities’ 24/7 occupancy and the continuous operation of ventilation systems, an efficient heat recovery system can lead to cost savings.
Trending with the accelerated movement toward electrified buildings, current best practices for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) and electrical design incorporate heat pump technology for efficient heating, on-site renewables for clean electricity production, and energy storage for resilience and grid flexibility.
Energy storage solutions can be found in battery electric or thermal storage. It’s a best practice to use thermal storage for thermal loads, such as heating and cooling, and battery energy storage for electrical loads, such as lighting and plug loads. This minimizes the environmental impact of battery production and disposal and instead enables energy storage using natural resources like water or ice.
Building for the Future
One recently completed design of a secure behavioral health facility incorporated these sustainable and resilient design features into otherwise conventional hot water and chilled water variable-volume air handling systems. This provided systems that are largely familiar to maintenance personnel, coupled with ice storage tanks and a piping loop to enable energy transfer and storage. The building is also equipped with physical space and electrical infrastructure for a future addition of on-site solar.
The choice of electrified heating, thermal storage, and solar-ready infrastructure allows for the control of heating and cooling energy production and usage. This optimizes both cost and carbon emissions based on current utility rate structures and provides opportunities for adaptability as grid electricity pricing and emission rates change over time.
Historically, sustainable design measures come at a cost premium. Today, however, with rising energy prices, the economics of these features and technologies have become favorable. Additionally, federal tax credits available for clean energy technologies lead to appealing net costs of efficient and sustainable design.
Successful outcomes are dependent on thoughtful, intentional design and operational approaches, which should be focused on wellness and positive environmental impacts. In doing so, designers are helping to improve the resilience of individuals, facilities, and ultimately communities. This is what transformative design for restorative outcomes looks like when put into practice.
Citations:
1 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-norms/
3 https://www.nami.org/988/criminal-justice-reform-means-reforming-the-mental-health-system/
Brooke Martin, AIA, CCHP, NCARB, LEED GA, is an associate and justice architect at Dewberry, bmartin@dweberry.com. David Evers, PE, CEM, LEED AP, is a vice president, managing director of the Midwest engineering group and Decarbonization/Electrification Leader at Dewberry, devers@dewberry.com.