Academy of Architecture for Justice

Across both the private and public sectors, large-scale systemic reform efforts that pivot around performance metrics and outcomes are a New Normal. Assessing outcomes through a quantitative and qualitative lens, and evaluating the contribution of individual personnel and collective staff to those outcomes, has become integral to systems level change that is founded in research and driven by large and small data with a goal of greater accountability. There is economics logic behind this thinking – roughly and typically half of an organization's budget is allocated to personnel salaries and, as such, holding staff accountable for outcomes is one of many strategies that ensure long term organizational viability and sustainability.

What does this imply for the remaining portion of an organization's annual expenditures? Much, if not all, of that remaining budget is assigned to the construction of new and operations of existing facilities. Given the sophistication of emerging data-science and related trends, we may well be on the cusp of parallel expectations for return on annual CAPEX and OPEX investments in the form of accountability on organizational outcomes from the physical plant.

Responding to these accountability-driven trends, many state and regional leaders have turned to multi-disciplinary teams that bring their far-reaching expertise and insight to bear on bold innovation initiatives that aim to increase impact and raise the bar on outcomes No one describes the power and mechanics of collaborative innovation better than Tony Wagner, Expert in Residence at Harvard University's Innovation Lab and author of Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

Wagner states that "innovation is a team sport" and that "fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself." Innovation requires a willingness to do the hard things and take big bites, to be irreverent, to step outside the comfort of one's expertise and way of doing business, to perforate the safety of one's silo and to let in a broad range of viewpoints and knowledge, to color outside the lines and even to throw out the baby with the bathwater when the situation calls for it.

Bold action through a cross-disciplinary team

Guided and inspired by all the great information with regard to how innovation happens, driven by their own belief in the power of design to support a restorative justice movement that is fast growing teeth and feet and genuine momentum, a group of talented young architects at CGL made one of those bold and "crazy" moves that Steve Jobs would have applauded. Taking cues from great education and justice reform exemplars, they assembled a cross-disciplinary team of change-makers, including one outspoken activist plus one veteran educator with a long history of success with incarcerated juveniles, to tackle the challenge of reimagining juvenile justice facilities.

The team was charged with examining the available research, digging deep into all promising leads, and formulating a plausible data-supported theory to guide the future of Juvenile Justice design. Soon that team expanded to include input from policymakers, program innovators, foundation executives, attorneys, elected officials, nonprofit leadership, commissioners and additional educator activists. This team's collaborative posture, cross-disciplinary composition and resultant journey eventually led us right back to this often forgotten foundational principle of great design – the voice and experience of the End User.

The New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJSTEP)

Boris Franklin served eleven years of a fifteen year sentence at what some generations still refer to as Rahway State Penitentiary, renamed East Jersey State Prison in 1988. If you have seen the 1989 Sylvester Stallone movie Lock Up or the 1978 Award Winning Documentary Scared Straight, you already know the facility as both were filmed there. Built in 1896, it is a notorious maximum security environment with crumbling infrastructure housing approximately fifteen hundred men labeled as the state's most difficult offenders. It is in this harsh environment that Boris first encountered Dr. Donald Rodin, founder of Rutgers NJSTEP/Mountainview Communities and Ms. Margaret Quern Atkins, Director of Rutgers NJSTEP.

In 2006, armed with preliminary data on the effects of education on recidivism and his own experiences as a teaching volunteer inside New Jersey prisons, Professor Rodin founded the inaugural version of the Mountainview Communities. Rutgers NJ STEP/Mountainview Communities (RU-MVP) provides incarcerated NJSTEP students with the opportunity to pursue a four-year degree upon release from prison. New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) is a consortium of higher education institutions across the state that brings college courses into the New Jersey state prison system. NJ-STEP currently serves approximately six hundred students in the custody of the NJ Department of Corrections. RU-MVP currently enrolls approximately one hundred students across its New Brunswick and Newark and Camden campuses.

This two-phased program is arguably the most successful prisoner education initiative in the country with groundbreaking results as evidenced by the recent matriculation of a NJSTEP Mountainview graduate Chris Etienne into the Ivy's; he is currently enrolled at Columbia University and pursuing a Master's degree. A beneficiary of this groundbreaking program, Boris's significant experience with the prison system and his remarkable observational and analytic skill position him to be a pivotal contributor to this project.

Does it work?

The data is in. The preliminary quantitative analytics, supplemented by flawless intuition and faith that fueled the relentless commitment of Dr. Rodin and Ms. Atkins a decade ago, have been supplanted by the meta-analysis Evaluating the Effects of Correctional Education published by Rand Corporation in 2013. Rutgers NJSTEP Mountainview students continue to excel at every turn.

Boris Franklin, who made the Dean's List his very first semester at Rutgers New Brunswick, is an articulate and compelling example of the power of education to transform lives. At this juncture of this reading, if you have not read yet googled "Boris Franklin, East Jersey State Prison" and read Chris Hedges' remarkable and poignant account of Boris's release day in America Condemns Millions of Its Own Citizens to Misery, Suffering and Early Death, please be encouraged to click through and read it.

The voice of Boris Franklin

Our merry cross-disciplinary band of change-making innovators, formed at the behest of CGL in their wisdom to cast a wider research net and model their innovation team after proven interdisciplinary models, has the privilege of including Boris' voice in our ongoing work. His cogent observations, which continue to inform that work and even haunt our dreams, are sometimes unpopular, often counter-intuitive but always insightful. Each member of this team has emerged from this experience a little bit smarter and little more humble about our capacities as educators, designers, activists, and researchers respectively. We hope that you enjoy the Boris video series below.

Boris Franklin continues to be a remarkable resource and inspiration. Recently, I was given the opportunity to ask Boris a few follow-up questions about his prison education experience. Here are his answers.

Describe your learning spaces at East Jersey State Prison. What are some changes that you would make?

Boris: The NJSTEP classrooms at East Jersey are in leftover spaces in the "Main House" in the "attic". They are store rooms, offices, other spaces that have been converted into ad hoc makeshift classrooms. They are small and there is always a concern that the crumbling roof might cave in while students are in class. There is no room to expand the classrooms, and there is a huge waiting list of aspiring NJSTEP students for the limited number of available seats.

I would relocate the NJSTEP program to a proper educational facility with generously sized classrooms and room to serve every inmate who aspires to higher education. That facility should be bright and clean and cheerful, signaling to NJSTEP students that they are worthy of this chance. What message are you sending to the hardworking NJSTEP students by situating them in the worst leftover places in the prison complex?

Additionally, there should be study spaces and resources in the school that are accessible to NJSTEP students 24 hours a day. Many students return to the chaos of their cellblocks after classes and can't work on papers or continue their studies. I was lucky to be located in an annex called the "down under". We were able to continue to study after lights out and to work on projects in teams in that space. Most NJSTEP students don't have that flexibility.

If you were given the opportunity to join a team of Architects as they were developing the plans for a new prison or juvenile facility, what would you advise them to do?

Boris:  I would tell them to design it like a school, right down to places to display student work in the corridors.

There you have it.

I am forever changed by this experience and deeply grateful to fellow members of the core team Stacey Wiseman (CGL), Kristy Gasparino (formerly CGL), Ryan Critchfield (CGL) and Andrew Brown (NYC Department of Education) for creating a landscape where honest and difficult conversations were not only possible but encouraged. Please join us in subsequent publications, because this work continues to unfold in ever more interesting ways and because we are just getting warmed up.

_______________________________________

Xenia Cox is a reformer, education activist and innovator in architecture for education. Xenia's areas of expertise reside where facility and education interest, managing projects that seek to improve educational outcomes and linking educational goals to facility needs. Her mission is to craft and nurture the connections between instructional and cultural aspects of education reform and facility design. In her current role as founding Principal for Archademia, Xenia merges her extensive background in design and education to deliver cohesive, integrated, impactful facilities strategies that optimize built environment in support of student achievement.

(Return to the cover of the 2016 AAJ Journal Q2 issue)