In a blurry photograph, a blonde in a princess-cut white gown locks eyes with her groom as the pair descends opposite staircases. They aren’t in a chapel or wedding hall, but—as the peeling paint, moldy stairwell, and tiered cellblocks reveal—a former penitentiary. The photo is the web header of a February 2024 Wall Street Journal article titled “Wedding Venues That Give a New Twist to the Ol’ Ball and Chain.”
When I first came across the Wall Street Journal piece—and the accompanying photo taken inside Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, often considered the country’s first true penitentiary—the first emotion that came to me was rage. As it turns out, jails and prisons rebranded as luxury experiences—including apartments, boutique hotels, wedding venues, and Airbnbs—abound. In the past thirty years or so, real-estate developers, hospitality and tourism companies, and investment funds have found new ways to profit from, and disguise, the legacy of systemic punishment.
Clearly, “prison flipping,” or the act of repurposing carceral facilities, is not inherently redemptive. Haunted house tours, curated cell block stays, and swimming pools built on prison grounds do not inform an abolitionist future. Beyond celebrating harmful tropes, these attempts turn incarceration into an aesthetic to be celebrated. They are acts of erasure, cruel in their levity and complicit in reducing profound histories of violence to an asterisk on a venue’s plaque.
Transforming these spaces should instead be guided by abolitionist pillars. This looks like acknowledging the history of the space, addressing the material and emotional needs of those directly impacted, and reinvesting in conditions that prioritize healing.
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Across the country, there have been some meaningful efforts to convert former prisons. In Portland, the Bybee Lakes Hope Center has transformed the abandoned Wapato Correctional Facility into a support hub for people experiencing homelessness. Originally built as a transitional dormitory for $58 million, the building sat unused for eighteen years. Now, the 17-acre property is home to a half-acre garden, an orchard, art studios, a full daycare center, and at least 318 beds for people seeking services.
Some initiatives focus on public education, converting former jails into platforms that confront and rewrite prevailing stories. For example, the Davenport Jail, under the purview of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, has become a historic site that hosts residencies, educational programs, and other art engagements. In one such project, the museum partnered with the art and justice initiatives Visualizing Abolition and The Writing on the Wall to replace inaccurate histories of jail operations—what former executive director Robb Woulfe described as “a Disney version of a roadside jail where a couple of ne’er do wells drank too much”—with well-researched accounts, including the jail’s role in confining Chinese migrant laborers.
Artist and activist Ashley Hunt maps additional examples within the movement to close and repurpose prisons in his latest film, And Water Brings Tomorrow. The film spotlights projects ranging from Los Angeles’s Chucos Justice Center, a youth and community center combating the school-to-prison pipeline, to New York’s Hudson Sports Complex, a training and entertainment venue. It also highlights community organizing efforts such as the Close California Prisons Campaign of the CURB coalition (Californians United for a Responsible Budget), which advocates for decarceration, facility closures, and reinvestment in local communities.
Still, today, there are many facilities that sit empty: MCI-Cedar Junction and MCI-Concord in Massachusetts, Downstate Correctional Facility near Beacon, New York, SCI-Graterford outside of Philadelphia. There are plans to turn some of these facilities, including Downstate (the setting for the Oscar-nominated film Sing Sing), into mixed-use developments that would include affordable housing. For Hunt, sites that have yet to be repurposed are “filled with . . . fugitive life that is not authorized by the carceral order and literally composts carceral architecture into some new future.” In other words, these spaces aren’t truly empty; instead, in their departure from what existed, there is possibility for repair.
Nicole D. Porter, the senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, argues that it is crucial to have repurposing plans in place, ideally before prisons close. She cites FCI-Dublin, a women’s prison in California that closed in 2024 following rampant sexual abuse and depopulation. It is now a prospective ICE detention center. “There should be intentional efforts to repurpose, because leaving [facilities empty] opens [them] to continue to be prisons and warehouses, as there is already pressure to disappear people in a new way,” she says. If the plan for FCI-Dublin succeeds, the facility will join over forty other detention centers that have been opened or repurposed since Trump first came to office.
“Closing prisons is not the end point of abolition, but the starting point,” Hunt emphasizes. Reaching this starting point takes much participation. In the case of Downstate—and more than twelve other decommissioned prisons in New York—the Prison Redevelopment Commission, established in 2022, will guide what comes next. Commission members include stakeholders from real estate developers, such as Empire State Development’s Hope Knight, to philanthropists and advocates like Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker.
While proposed redevelopment plans for single facilities include budgets as high as $16 million, it remains unclear whether the perspectives of people who were formerly incarcerated in these spaces will be meaningfully considered.
Deanna Van Buren, an abolitionist architect and cofounder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), currently serves on the New York commission. She grew up driving by Lorton Correctional Complex, a former prison in Virginia that now holds apartments, an art gallery, and a museum. Her firm has worked on proposals to repurpose a number of former carceral facilities, from the Atlanta City Detention Center to MCI-Concord.
Van Buren sees the role of the designer as that of a bridge, bringing together parties that have very different ideas of what a space should become. “You have the correctional officers who might have worked there, you also have systems-impacted people who were tortured there,” Van Buren says. “What is your responsibility to them? Who are you accountable to?”
To illustrate this role, Van Buren cites her firm’s prison redevelopment board game, recently featured at a New York conference. Players take on roles like teachers, commuters, business owners, or family members of formerly incarcerated people. Together, they reimagine a carceral site using “life-sustaining” elements like housing, agriculture, retail, and restorative justice. They roll dice and place poker chips to represent how money is coming in, from state contracts to philanthropic grants.
“We were really able to come into a space of joy, connectivity, and radical imagination,” Van Buren reflects. “It’s actually how we have to do this thing. . . . [It’s] what architects, planners, real estate professionals, and city contractors would need to do.”
According to Van Buren, reimagining former sites of confinement means “addressing the entire justice core,” from courts to bail bond offices to other parts of the legal system. It also means confronting what’s missing from communities: affordable housing, daily material needs, and cultural spaces that support a vibrant quality of life.
Addressing these gaps means more than reimagining buildings—it requires building the systems and supports people need to return and remain home. This includes expanding pre-arrest diversions, building alternatives to incarceration, decriminalizing offenses, and eliminating cash bail. At the same time, reentry services must be robust, centering on safe housing, gainful employment, and comprehensive mental health support.
These kinds of measures can have dramatic results. At Atlanta City Detention Center, multi-pronged efforts to reduce the jail’s population were successful: in May of 2020, the facility, meant to cage 1,300, held under 50 people, although that number has since crept up. Similarly, in Massachusetts, DJDS collaborated with the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, an organization that has long led the charge in decarceral work, to push for the shutdown of Framingham Prison.
When it comes to a model that other states can use—and every state, in Van Buren’s opinion, should have some version of the New York commission—DJDS’s feasibility report for the Atlanta jail offers one. It recommends three main stages: reimagining the block by considering neighborhood needs and desires and honoring the site’s history; repurposing spaces by embedding art, light, and community programs; and building systems that ensure long-term ecological and economic resilience through green design and job transition programs.
Much like the abolition movement, the process itself is central when it comes to reconceptualizing a decommissioned prison, jail, or detention center. That can include allowing people to access the space before it has been developed. “When people start to go to a site and activate it, it changes the way they perceive a place,” Van Buren says. She points to Chicago’s Redmoon Theater, which transformed abandoned industrial sites into performance spaces that helped revive parts of the city.
While the Atlanta City Detention Center has not completely shut down, it has incorporated an arrest diversion–meets–sobering center into the complex. Rather than pushing for a wholesale demolition, the strategy became “to carve away at it,” a necessary pivot after the mayor and other key advocates lost their political positions. This in-between strategy also applies to New York City’s Borough-Based Jails project, the initiative to turn Rikers into four smaller facilities. “I can’t stop them from building [the jails],” Van Buren says, “but everything you do should plan for a world without them—you could try to build so that they could be easily converted to housing, for instance.” Of course, that is not happening at present: the jail plans tout a market- and design-friendly exterior in efforts to distract from the cages inside.
Even as new jails and detention centers rise—driven by mass criminalization and ever-cruel deportations and kidnappings—the movement to shut down and repurpose jails perseveres. “We’ve already done this with our military bases,” Van Buren reminds us. “Look at the huge effort and marketing around that repurposing.” Porter hopes state budget cuts increase pressure to downsize prisons, as they once did in the early 2000s.
Conversations around repurposing prisons echo debates over the future of plantations in the U.S. South. A beaming Blake Lively celebrating her nuptials at Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in 2012 evokes an eerily similar feeling to the bride featured in the Wall Street Journal’s story twelve years later. Both cases reflect a disturbing lack of sensitivity to spaces marked by historical suffering.
Ultimately, violent erasure and commodification have defined this country since its inception. Building an abolitionist future requires recognizing the harm and trauma that occurred in carceral spaces and paying homage to those who were lost to—or who survived—the system.
“If we tend to the past like soil we may begin to collectively repair,” says artist and Freedom to Grow cofounder jackie sumell. Her latest project, The Short Line—a living garden at the Michener Art Museum, which is housed in the former Bucks County Jail—transforms a site of confinement into one of care. “Where there were once bars and bricks, there is now soil, solidarity, and shared history,” she says. “These plants perform the kind of quiet, generative work our society too often overlooks: the slow, necessary labor of restoration.”
As repurposing projects gain traction, Porter urges the movement to follow the lead of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Historical Marker Project. During our conversation, I was reminded of a visit last year to EJI’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, an educational site in Montgomery, Alabama, that seeks to honor the approximately 10 million Black people who were enslaved on this land. A placard in the park reads: “The tiny fingerprints of enslaved children who turned bricks as they dried can be seen today on the bricks of historic Charleston buildings.” It poses a haunting question: What traces will remain of the millions whose hands touched carceral walls?
Image: An interior shot of the former Eastern State Penitentiary, now a museum. Thomas Hawk / flickr
