A cell is still a cell no matter how nice it is
From today children are in Swedish prisons. Children who come from vulnerable homes. Children who themselves have been exposed to crime. Tonight they will try to sleep alone in their cells at the institutions in Högsbo, Kumla, Rosersberg, Sagsjön, Skenäs and Ystad.
The government has pushed through the law amendment despite the fact that Bris, Save the Children and UNICEF Sweden believe that it goes against the Convention on the Rights of the Child and dehumanizes children. The Legislative Council also criticized the proposal for lacking rules on children’s right to school during detention.
Even the union Vision, which represents the employees of the Correctional Service, has said no. “Imprisoning children is a societal failure,” writes association chairperson Veronica Magnusson. She warns that the government is going against established research and implementing reforms whose consequences no one can foresee.
But from one keep it dead quiet: the architects.
During the spring, through Alstra Byggforum, a separatist association for women and trans people in the built environment, I wondered why architecture was not mentioned. We have asked questions that should be obvious: Who takes responsibility for the rooms that are built to lock children in? What spatial logics make this possible? Where is the architecture’s resistance?
The correctional service and the property manager Specialfastigheter plan to increase the number of places from 12,000 to 19,500 until the year 2035. The number of inmates has almost doubled in the last ten years, according to the Crime Prevention Council. For the architectural profession, this means a rapidly growing market. At the same time, housing construction is collapsing and unemployment is spreading. According to Sweden’s Architects, it is now prisons and buildings for the Armed Forces that give assignments. The adaptation of existing institutions is only the beginning.
It is telling that more architects have protested against scrapped minimum ceiling height measurements than the very task of designing prisons. Instead, the expansion is described as an opportunity to “make a difference”, among others by the architects Krook & Tjäder, who are currently developing an institution in Trelleborg. Also “Designing with Empathy”, the criticized collaborative project between the Prison Service and industrial design at Konstfack, worked on the question of how design can contribute to well-being in environments “where safety is always the main focus”.
But how can anyone, least of all a child, be able to thrive in a locked institution? It does not matter that the cells at Kumla are newly renovated or that they have their own shower and toilet.
It is still a cell.
A prison surrounded by several meter high walls, fences and barbed wire.
What does it do to a child to never see a horizon?
When the role of architecture is reduced to making the prison more humane, the very decision to build it has already been made inviolable. That logic also characterizes other state institutions. Millions of kroner are now going to tighten security at so-called return centers, where children live for several years in unsafe conditions. As of October, the government abolishes the possibility of own accommodation for asylum seekers, which forces everyone to live in the Migration Agency’s accommodation. Minister of Migration Johan Forssell describes how “a good and neat living environment” can be created with playgrounds and new paint on the walls.
In such a time, it is not enough to talk about social benefit or evidence-based design. Why does the architectural profession not formulate a common opposition to designing prisons, instead of reducing the issue to an individual position, to the choice of curtains?
