Death by Design

In July of 2024, a man in Illinois’s Stateville Correctional Facility died. His death was likely due to a combination of the heat aggravating his asthma and medical neglect. The man’s cell was on the top gallery and he did not have access to a running fan, let alone air conditioning.

During the same heatwave, while locked in a different Illinois prison, I overheard officers saying that a couple of people on another deck were suffering from heat exhaustion. They didn’t die, so it didn’t make the news, but it makes me wonder how many people must be suffering the same fate across the country: slowly baking between iron bars and behind concrete walls. In Texas prisons, forty-one people died of heat during the summer of 2023 alone. On the opposite end of the weather spectrum, the Prison Journalism Project recently published a dossier of reporting from incarcerated people about suffering from terrible cold.

As Dana McKinney White and Lisa Haber-Thomson wrote in Inquest, U.S. prisons have historically been built upon a “design vocabulary of retributive justice” that continues to produce “carceral landscapes that have proven detrimental to recovery, reintegration, and broader community health.”

Humans in custody spend most of their time indoors, usually with a cellmate in a cell the size of an average bathroom. Windows are rare, ventilation even more so. These conditions cause numerous negative mental and physical health effects. Since arriving in prison, I’ve suffered persistently from disrupted sleep, respiratory issues, and elevated stress and anxiety. Our living environment is a big part of the problem, but it doesn’t have to be.

As Illinois prepares to demolish and rebuild Stateville prison after a class-action lawsuit exposed its inhumane conditions, I’d like to consider how prisons built to increase wellness could make indoor spaces healthier and transform how people in custody serve their sentences—not to mention the lateral benefits for those working and volunteering behind these walls. These innovations need not involve large budgets or excessive manpower to make a difference.

• Cell size: First and foremost, all cells should be designed for a single person and in adherence to the internationally accepted (and U.S.-accepted, but unimplemented) Mandela rules. This would also help curb disease transmission.
• Ventilation: Either windows need to be able to open or a system must be designed to pump in fresh clean air to all living and working areas. All people in prison must be able to access circulating air—cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
• Lighting: Inmates don’t get enough sleep, and electric lighting is a likely culprit. Shoddy fluorescent cell lights and overly bright hallway lighting are too dim for daylight and too bright for night, disrupting our natural circadian rhythm. Circadian lighting design is an innovative solution. Transitional lighting can be added to existing lighting fixtures with the ease of an app. In addition to circadian lighting, prison designers should also strive for maximum natural light. Simple fixes include installing sheer blinds that block glare without reducing natural light and plenty of windows to maximize daylight.
• Sound: Long-term exposure to loud noises raises stress hormones. It’s a well-known method of torture. Prisons are overwhelmingly noisy, but new prisons might create quiet spaces such as phone booths, use white noise to provide an underlying hum, and integrate sound-absorbent materials. Industrial carpets can act like sponges for ambient sound and reduce excessive noise from movement across the floor. In the typical X-design prison housing units, a multi-floor design common in recent prisons, carpeting can reduce noise transmission between cells and rooms on different levels.
• Nature: Biophilic design could reduce stress and enhance creativity, clear thinking, and happiness by connecting people with nature. Into a planet of iron and hard corners, designers could introduce green walls, natural furniture crafted in fluid shapes, and grass-like industrial carpeting—all of which have produced positive effects in research participants. A simple start is including naturescape screen options on personal digital cable channels and looping them on dayroom TVs.

After a decade in Illinois state prisons, I’ve stopped believing Illinois politicians will ever close a prison without a court order or public outcry. Illinois continues to buy into the failed tough-on-crime policies that have produced mass incarceration and keep inmates in conditions that deteriorate our bodies and minds. But if Illinois is determined to build a new human warehouse over Stateville’s ashes, the least I can hope for is a more humane gray-barred hotel.

If society is serious about rehabilitation in prisons, we must become more attuned to, and also invest in, mental well-being. Health-positive design features would not only benefit persons in custody, but also the thousands of workers, volunteers, and others who spend significant time in prisons. The mental and emotional health of everyone working and living within these walls is at stake.

This article was written in collaboration with Kirby Sokolow, coeditor of Prison Health News.

_{Image: Shawn Rossi / Flickr}

Contributors

Leo Cardez Leo Cardez is the pseudonym of a writer-activist in custody in Illinois. He is a two-time winner of the PEN America Prison Writing Contest and a contributing writer and Advisory Board Member for Prison Health News.

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• Institutions & Practices

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• Carceral Geographies
• conditions of confinement
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors