The Justice Centre at Leoben

A couple of weeks ago, I'd sent out an email to a group of friends and acquaintances about the Leoben Justice Centre in Leoben, Austria. This appears to be a radical departure from prisons seen around the world. It appears to be getting quite a lot of attention of late. After I'd mailed out my commentary on prisons, I came across an article on http://change.org that talks about the prison.

It discusses some of the same issues I'd brought up in my commentary. The change.org article also contains links to a New York Times article that covers the author's conversations with the architect of the Leoben Justice Centre.

Anyway, posted below is what I had in my post to my little group of friends.

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As architects, planners and urban designers (or as people with interests in these areas) we are often in positions to make decisions (design and planning decisions, of course) that affect people in profound ways. And as such, architects and planners are implicitly burdened with a huge social responsibility. I wasn't taught this in school. It was impressed upon me by a close friend, an Iranian architect, I worked for a while ago.

A lot of this social responsibility is embodied in the work of architects. This has led to architects working with psychologists, social scientists and other professionals from streams of study completely (one would think) unrelated to architecture, in addition to all those electromechanical services consultants that they normally work with. And more recently, a lot of us have turned to sustainable, green architecture. Such work has produced radically different ways of looking at school design (smaller classrooms with greater teacher/student interaction and audio visual teaching aids), hospital design (and consequently changes in the way healthcare is provided), zoo design (where animals are no longer caged, but human beings travel the zoo in caged vehicles and watch animals in their natural habitats), rehab centres (that no longer look drab and dreary and induce depression themselves) and many, many other reforms in our built-up environment.

A European architect I used to work for used to tell me that in the Netherlands and other Scandinavian nations, the prison design briefs handed to architects contain a specific requirement to include, by deliberate design, a non-obvious path of escape. While it seems a rather counter intuitive requirement, it is there to instill a sense of hope in criminals. A hope that they are in there for reform and correction (it is simply not enough to call prisons correctional facilities) and to emerge back in society as useful responsible citizens and not merely as punishment or as society's way of getting even for what they did to society. In this context, it then becomes important to design prisons that are not depressing places to inhabit, for both wrong doers and enforcers. It should foster healthy social conditions; it should encourage reform and provide avenues (in the form of counselling, training programmes, educational opportunities - higher and vocational, etc.) to enable such reform.

At the end of the day, criminals are a reflection of society (just as the Bernie Madoffs, Kenneth Lays, Jeffery Skillings and Bernie Ebbers of the world are reflections of their own industries and work environments or the echelons of society they move around in). They are created by society. More often than not, most criminals are not criminals by choice, but rather a product of their environment. Most normal societies would rather not have criminals in their midst and will do whatever it takes to prevent the rise of crime and thus criminals and the social problems that give rise to crime. (Hmmmm.... I wonder what that says about American society, which today has the highest number of incarcerated people per capita than any other nation in the world - developed, developing or undeveloped - with more than 1 in 100 adults in prison as of the beginning of 2008[1]. Well I have a theory about that, but that is topic for another post.).

Anyway, enough of my rant. The Justice Centre in Leoben, Austria is one such prison that actually aims to correct, rehabilitate and make useful citizens out of criminals. Of course, I am not trying to be so naïve as to assume that all prisoners can be corrected in such fashion. There are psychopaths and sociopaths who cannot be dealt with in this manner and they require other forms of incarceration and help. But before we condemn someone it behoves us to look inwards in deep introspection and ask ourselves if we are as clean and guilt free as we would like to think we are. Haven't we all, at some time or other taken things that don't really belong to us? That ballpoint pen from the office stationery room for personal use, the left over food from someone's meeting/party, the shampoo from that hotel room, etc. Isn't that wrong? Just because it is not accorded the importance or the label of unacceptable behaviour, it is nonetheless wrong since it is not ours to take, and yet we still do it. So we have to be very careful when we judge someone who may have done something out of desperation. Even the Bible (and I am not a believer of any faith) talks of Jesus telling a crowd that wants to stone a prostitute (or a woman who had committed adultery - don't remember now) thus: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone....". Yeah, I have chosen a controversial passage that does not appear in early and original versions of the Bible, but it has been around from the time of the Catholic Church, enough to warrant its importance to morality and society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Center_Leoben

It is ironic that the prison complex appears to have taken a couple of sentences out of the US Constitution and placed them around its perimeter. Ironic because, US prisons today are not correctional facilities (though many of them are called that), but a private industrial complex aimed at generating free (almost) labour. Interestingly, it is also situated not too far from a University as well.

Any way take a look at the pictures....

CAN YOU GUESS WHAT THIS PLACE IS ?