Locked Into Post-Utopian Design

It is a well-honed cage. Twin Towers Correctional Facility is designed to be a surreal hybrid of modern technology and enlightenment ideals. After sitting empty for more than a year because of budget problems, the jail will finally open Jan. 25, it was announced Friday. When it does, the squat, medieval stone form--speckled with slot windows--will hum inside with state-of-the-art electronics and surveillance. The facility will accommodate 4,100 inmates who are either awaiting trial or serving up to one-year sentences.

But the gleaming new jail is also a cool refinement of a 200-year-old utopian scheme by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham for a model prison that could recast criminals as productive social beings. Built at a cost of $373 million, the facility at 450 Bauchet St.--at the eastern edge of Chinatown--owes a debt to Bentham’s notorious experiment in social engineering.

In Bentham’s 18th century scheme, the prisoner was controlled by the knowledge that he could never escape the scrutiny of an ever-present gaze. Bentham’s proposed Panopticon, which was never built, was a hollow drum with a single watchtower at its center, its cells set along its outer shell so that each inmate could be constantly watched. The premise of his plan was that architecture could affect human behavior; his design was meant to bring about complete moral reform.

The design for Twin Towers, however, follows the form, but without the utopian hopefulness. Designed by the architectural firm Helmuth Obata Kassabaum, Twin Towers aims for maximum control at minimum cost. As such, it is not only an eerie symbol of our increased desire to control social boundaries, it is also a testament to our diminished moral expectations.

It is a seemingly insurmountable, if narrow, task: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, one in 167 U.S. residents was incarcerated at the end of 1995, nearly double the 1985 figure. The pressure to find space for these hidden populations has led to new needs--as density within the jail system spirals upward, officials have asked architects to devise ever-more efficient designs to achieve greater security and still accommodate tighter operating budgets.

Bentham’s plan marked the birth of the modern prison system. Although the original plan was discarded in favor of a notorious system of penal colonies, several variants were built in England during the 19th century. An alternate version was built in 1829 in the United States, at Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, where cells were arranged like spokes emanating from a central guard post, sacrificing total observation to segregate prisoners from one another.

Twin Towers is a radical refinement of those aged structures. Its hygienically dubbed “inmate reception center” is a passage to a world carefully removed from our own. Inmates enter through a quarter-mile-long twisting corridor, where they are unchained, numbered, bathed, tested and categorized. Tiny isolation cells are set along the corridor to contain panicked prisoners until they passively accept their fate. Architecture reinforces the idea that here authority is everything.

Inside, there is an almost dumb primitive order. Both towers--each a squat seven stories--are shaped like two interlocking hexagons, with an elevated central observation booth at the core of each. Cells are arranged in two neat stories along the hexagon’s outer walls, creating six distinct modules, and each of those, in turn, is divided into six pods with 36 inmates--the jail’s principal unit. Cells are the legal minimum--72 square feet for two inmates.

The new Panopticon is broken down into identical segments, each pod and module repeated over and over again like an image endlessly reflected in two opposed mirrors: They are color-coded because even guards familiar with the jail could get lost. Thus, the inmate will be locked within a maze-like trap that denies the existence of an outside world even as it also denies individuality. As is true of any typical jail system, there is perhaps no greater punishment than the denial of a man’s existence.

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But technology here takes that vision to a new extreme. As in Bentham’s plan, a single guard has enormous control; here, at each level, one guard perched behind a glass screen can lock and unlock cells, listen to conversations and videotape disturbances. Chained inmates are transported unaccompanied in stainless-steel elevators from floor to floor observed and overheard from above. In case of danger, the jail’s computerized central control center can seal shut access doors on any floor.

To ensure maximum efficiency, movement of inmates is reduced to a minimum; meals are wheeled in to the inmates on stainless steel carts; there is no large centralized cafeteria. Church services are broadcast by video over an internal channel, so there is no need to take inmates to a chapel. Visitors--unguarded--are brought up to the appropriate module. An inmate, in fact, leaves his floor for only three reasons: court, sickness or release.

The evolution of the internment system has reduced the system of control to its purest form, cunningly tightening the grip of authority. Control is now supremely economical. That rigid order also means less demand on staff--a key goal of today’s overburdened penal system.

But Bentham’s design was part of a broader moral plan. His enlightened cage was set against the shadowy medieval dungeon and its multiple torture instruments. In the Panopticon, the sense of being watched would, in theory, be so total that the jailer would be unnecessary: Prisoners would reform themselves under an Orwellian gaze. At Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, each inmate was left in contemplative solitude--a perversion of the monastic ideal. In each, the professed goal was naively utopian. As Bentham put it: “Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated . . . all by a simple idea in architecture.”

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Now, the penal system seems to have given up hope of reform and is myopically focused on order. At Twin Towers there are, however, rewards for inmates who behave. In a perverse play on Dante’s rising rings of hell, inmates who follow the rules closely will be moved to better pods on the floors above, earning select privileges: increased outdoor and TV time and other recreational activities. It is a blunt game where good prisoners are segregated in stages from bad.

So far, Puritan visions of reform have failed--our jails have remained inhuman spaces of violence and rat cage-like overcrowding. With pointed irony, the long-abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania was recently transformed into a screaming dark dungeon oozing uncontrolled madness in the film “Twelve Monkeys”--an image that played on middle-class fears of a lurking violent chaos.

Of course, the underlying mission of Twin Towers is not to eradicate evil, but rather to make it invisible--to shut out what we fear and hate. And that desire may be a rejection of our own civilization. As Orwell put it: “I never went into a jail without feeling (most visitors to jails feel the same) that my place was on the other side of the bars.” The barriers between the guilty and the innocent are not as rigidly drawn as we would like them to be.

But even the limited ideals of Twin Towers are already mired in frustration and futility: It can accommodate only a minuscule percentage of the overflow prison population. Once opened, it will be asked to do the impossible--to function as part of a system that wants to remove violence not only from our neighborhoods, but from our consciousness. In its small way, Twin Towers is no more realistically utopian than Bentham’s Panopticon, but its design is born of frustration, with little room for humanity.