Consider This from NPR - The Quiet Trend of Reimagining and Reusing Prisons and Jails

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

After decades of scandals over horrible conditions, many states are reimagining prisons and jails and reusing those properties to benefit the community.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org It was terrible because it had a lack of funding, so it was like dirty and dangerous. I think over 200, 300 people used to get stabbed a year. But it used to have, it was dormitory. So it was like 150 people in a dormitory all day with no heat or no AC. So you could imagine the frustration and what was going on. So, you know, it was not a good place

to be. That's Kareem Mowat talking about Lorton Reformatory, a once notorious prison in Lorton, Virginia. Opened as a reformatory and workhouse in 1910, it housed inmates from Washington, D.C., which is about 20 miles away. Now, the design was supposed to encourage prisoner rehabilitation. It was the influence of a reform movement of the early 20th century with fewer enclosing walls, more windows, large open green spaces, and dormitories instead of cell blocks. But by the time Mowat got there, he spent about 10 years there starting in the 1990s, it had become a violent, overcrowded nightmare. One of the reasons it was so dangerous is because of the open dormitories. You can imagine if you're in separate cells, people are separated and you can actually,

if something happened, you might go to your cell or you might be locked down for a while. Now, because you're in open dormitories all day, somebody could get stabbed right here, right beside you. They come and clean the blood up and everything is back to normal five minutes later. When Congress took over control of people from the District of Columbia who were convicted of felonies, Lorton Reformatory began shutting down, closing for good in 2001. Mowat was there during the shutdown, and he says it was chaos for prisoners like him. It was a crazy experience because you had buses that was pulling up every day to take people out, right? They were just telling you to pack your stuff, you're leaving. So you know you're about to be really far from your family. Moat ended up in Youngstown, Ohio, far from his family back in Washington, D.C.

As you've probably figured out by now, he's no longer in prison. He's become a filmmaker. And earlier this year, he premiered a documentary on the prison, Lorton, Prison of Terror. The film looks at the history of the place and its impact on the people who were incarcerated there. During the filming, he decided to go back to Lorton, and what he found was a big surprise. I never knew that until I actually got released from prison, and I happened to just be driving past there, and I said, man, Lorton still was up? I thought Lorton was knocked down by that time. I thought they bulldozed everything, and I just drove over there and looked and I was like, man, what is this? People are actually living here? Yeah, I was blown away.

Lorton Reformatory is now Liberty, a sprawling village of townhomes and apartments with space for retail and restaurants and some of the same buildings that once housed prisoners. It definitely resurrected memories because everything is still in place. Today, the guard tower stands washed over playgrounds and a sparkling blue pool. The same barred windows and brick walls that separated men and women from their families are trendy architectural elements in chic, loft-style apartments. But for Kareem Mowat, luxury amenities would not be enough to draw him back. It definitely resurrected memories because everything is still in place.

So it's not like they just kept this one wall or this one walkway. It's literally the whole prison is still a prison, but they changed the dormitories into apartments. Lawrenton Reformatory, it turns out, is not unique. Slowly, quietly, a revolution is taking place over correctional facilities. And it's a stark contrast to the noisy, often circular debates over defunding the police. Since 2000, some 21 states have partially or fully closed at least one correctional facility. And they're using them for everything from film studios to housing, even a whiskey distillery. Consider this. More than 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States.

After decades of scandals over horrible conditions, many states are rethinking prisons and jails and reusing those properties. But with violent crime on the rise, will officials put repurposing on pause? That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, September 3rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. you know to be honest there were a number of people that really questioned whether people would want to live in a prison.

David Voss is project manager at the Alexander Company. That's the real estate developer that transformed Lorton Reformatory into Liberty, a suburban village of townhomes and apartments with plans for restaurants and retail. The complex includes a pool, fitness center, tot lots, and a community room with cozy leather seating in the former prison's chow hall, all in prison buildings that are largely intact. Voss said it helped that Lorton wasn't designed like a traditional penitentiary. Many of these prison buildings had windows, had an abundance of natural light, so it really didn't feel like a prison. So we weren't really battling with the physical constraints that you would normally have with a prison.

This felt more like a college campus than a prison setting. Voss says that local homeowner associations and a citizen's advisory board helped to flesh out the vision for what to do with a defunct prison. The community wanted to see a mix of housing types, single-family homes, apartments, townhomes. They partnered with Fairfax County, Virginia, and other developers, but also received funding from historic preservation grants, which sometimes made the design a bit tricky.

The challenge to redeveloping the buildings on the prison campus had to be done in a fashion that preserved all the historic features. We were utilizing historic tax credits as part of the financing for the project and historic features that need to be retained include the windows, included the bars on the windows, the masonry walls, the concrete floors, all of those elements are character-defining features of the prison buildings, so we had to retain all of those features. We took great strides to try to create spaces for people that were softer and more friendly. But at the same time, he says, they wanted to acknowledge the prison's long history. There was often reports about prisoner mistreatment,

the fact that many of the prisoners didn't see the light of day for more than an hour a day, and that it kind of had a dark history to it. So we spent quite a bit of time rebranding the campus as well, and we came up with the term liberty. We're liberating the prison from its past and creating a new use, but at the same time respecting its history. Kareem Mowat was incarcerated at the site for about 10 years. He survived the violence and overcrowding at Lorton, but then experienced the dislocation and trauma of being moved to Ohio when the prison closed, 300 miles away from family and friends in D.C. who could help keep him grounded and focused on a life after prison.

He wants people to remember that there is a history of suffering at Liberty that he says the informational signs and on-site museum don't adequately address. I wouldn't live there because it still feels like a prison. I mean, you could, when you look out your bedroom window, it's a tower right there. So personally, I couldn't do it. I understand the people that doesn't, that does live there. I understand it because I spoke to a few of them. But because of my experience of living there, incarcerated, I couldn't do it. Can repurposing prisons satisfy those who think incarceration doesn't work, as well as those who say crime is on the rise and isn't being addressed. That's coming up.

We still have over 2 million people in prison in the United States. That's far too many, and it's a stain on the United States States democracy and social policy. Nicole Porter is the senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project. That's a group that believes that historic criminal justice policies are both ineffective and inequitable. And the group advocates for alternatives to adult and youth imprisonment, among other initiatives. I spoke with her about a recent report she researched and wrote entitled Repurposing Correctional Facilities to Strengthen Communities, and it focuses on 21 facilities that have closed since 2000. I asked her what's behind the repurposing trend and what proponents of decarceration hope to see going forward. Well, it's a mix of reasons. There has been

decarceration that supported prison closures and repurposing in states like New York, which is really ahead of the curve. But prisons have also closed because of the age of their facilities. Prisons have also closed in states like Illinois, even when there's an overcrowding situation because of the chronic harms in the prisons. Is there any sort of a through line to the places where the officials decided to close these facilities? Is there some overall trend you could point to? I think a through line has been, as states have been confronted with downsizing their prison capacity because of budget concerns or because the current capacity they have is excessive compared to the number of people that they continue to imprison. This is in states like New York specifically,

that there's been tough choices around which prisons have been selected for closure. Many of these prisons are in rural areas, far from cities, but there are some that are close to cities that have been selected because of the economic development potential for them. For example, Lorton was closed as part of a shift in policy, and it's in a high potential area, and its repurposing came about because of mixed-use real estate development. So there are economic interest for that closure. Other prisons, not so much. But there is leadership that can surface as a result of that to hopefully permanently repurpose those

prisons outside of correctional use. You mentioned the former Lorton Reformatory. It's now turned into a housing development. Do people have feelings about that? I mean, I'm just curious of like, I'm just wondering, like, how do people respond to that? The current reaction to this report and to the overall issue of Lorton no longer being or brown residents who want a local prison in D.C. because of their loved ones, because people are sent now far away to California and Texas, like I mentioned, and it closures is not mutually exclusive to where, for people who are currently in prison, where they're sentenced to, and the context around local prisons so that families and communities can maintain ties to incarcerated people. Well, as I think people will have ascertained by now, you are an advocate with a specific point of view around what role incarceration and other punitive measures should play in community safety. OK, so you're very clear about that.

So the elephant in the room right now, in fact, when you talk about this in the report, is the current rise in violent crime. So as briefly as you can, recognizing that this is a complicated issue, what's your best argument for why people should listen to you about this? Well, it's a point of view backed up by evidence and data. The United States increased its prison footprint as a response to crime 50 years ago, almost 50 years ago. Other countries like Germany and Sweden also had an increase in violent crime, but they viewed the people most at risk of crime breaking as their people. And so they invested in solutions and interventions that reduce contact with law enforcement and reduce the imagination of who broke laws meant for the people driving punitive policy that those people no longer had a future or shouldn't be worthy of one. So now in 2022, continuing mass incarceration policies is a choice. People have been offering

other solutions, including looking at countries who've experienced similar increases in crime and made different choices like interventions and education and guaranteed job programs. And the United States could do that now. I know the recent policies adopted by the Biden administration can support infrastructure support and other solutions, and those solutions should be looked at in the context of public safety and making different choices around incarceration, even in the context of increased crime and concerns of crime. Do you sense a political appetite to listen to the point of view of you and other advocates in your space? This report and the solutions offered within it are one pathway that I hope lawmakers and other stakeholders seriously engage with in terms of imagining a better country and a country that's safe for everyone, including those who have experienced violence, even in the midst of violent and decreases in violence since the early 90s,

even though now there's an uptick in it. So this report offers a window into what solutions are, particularly if American policymakers are thinking about everyone's future, not just the future for some, but everyone in this country deserves a future, including those who are most at risk of going to prison. That was Nicole Porter, Senior Director of Advocacy for the Sentencing Project. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin. you