At a jail in San Francisco, architects, academics, designers, and incarcerated men work together to design spaces that match the tenets of restorative justice. A classon space design was led by Oakland-based architect/designerDeanna VanBuren and academic Barb Toews as part of afour-day workshop on restorative justice. The workshop was composed of 18 men, mostcharged with violent crimes, who agreed toparticipate in a program called “Resolve to Stop the Violence,” which emphasizes restorative justice, focused on healing victims and offenders alike, as analternative to the traditional criminal punishment model.
An excerpt from anarticle about the program featured in the L.A. Timesreads:
In 2000, [Toews]conducted a workshop in a Pennsylvania prison with 13 inmates serving life sentences, most of whom had committed murder.The men were defensive, reluctant to share their feelings. So she shifted to metaphor: The traditional system, she told them, is like a boxing ring, with a winner and loser and outsiders determining the outcome.
“What would a room look like,”[Toews] asked, “where you could face anything you’ve done and be accountable for it?” Together, they created a vision and called it “Do No Harm” room. A picture window with a mountain view. A door that locks from the inside. Plants and rugs. The workshop dynamic shifted. Later, Toews wondered, “If we treated it as a potential for something literal, if the environment were different, how might that change how we do justice?”
Van Buren hopes that other architecturefirms that build jails and prisons will adopt a more collaborative model, involving people who are incarcerated as well as correctional officers. As Van Buren states in the aforementioned article, “The goal is to empower those inside the institutions and prod architects to actually talk to the people they are designing for,” she said. “That’s how an architect would practice in any other setting.”
Read more about the program, and its design focus, in thisin-depth article featured in the L.A. Times.