Abstract
The United States currently incarcerates more than two million men and women, the majority of whom struggle with poor mental health, substance abuse, and limited job prospects. Research suggests that access to natural environments improves personal and social well-being. Well-designed and well-built correctional landscapes have the potential to positively influence the lives of incarcerated people by improving their mental health and reentry outcomes and by reducing stress and fatigue among staff. This cannot happen without the active and committed involvement of landscape architects with the expertise to design environments that enhance the well-being of those who live and work in correctional facilities. We invite landscape architecture professionals to use their expertise to enhance and transform the correctional landscape, and we offer seven actions to facilitate such involvement. These actions emerged from lessons learned through three successful design-build projects inside Iowa’s only women’s state prison.
INTRODUCTION
The United States currently incarcerates more than two million people in its county jails, state prisons, and federal penitentiaries (Carson, 2015), or approximately 700 people per 100,000—a higher percentage than any other nation (Sentencing Project, 2016a). This number has increased 500% over the past 40 years, largely because of tough-on-crime policies, especially those related to drugs and three-strikes laws (Mauer, 2006; Sentencing Project, 2016a, 2016b). Approximately half of the individuals in correctional facilities are convicted of nonviolent drug and property offenses (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2016; Sentencing Project, 2014). The hope is that the $39 billion spent annually in correctional expenditures (Henrichson & Delaney, 2012) has been well spent when the 650,000 people who are released each year return to the community (Carson, 2015). Many factors must be considered in terms of an individual’s rehabilitation and reentry, such as their physical and mental health, their ability to cope with past abuse and victimization, and their employability. New approaches are needed to improve returning individuals’ success during re-entry. Introducing landscape architecture into correctional environments may be one such response, given how access to nature facilitates physical, emotional, and social health and well-being (Annerstedt & Währborg, 2011; Page, 2008).
Landscape architecture professionals have no influence on criminal justice policy, nor do they provide correctional services. Landscape architecture is not the sole solution for improving the health and well-being of those affected by corrections; however, we assert that any profession dedicated to human well-being can and should play a role in improving the correctional environment in support of the improved health of its occupants. Such involvement fulfills architects’ commitment to “design environments that enhance the health, safety, and welfare of the public” (Spears, Seydegart, Hansen, & Zulinov, 2010, p. 3) while also supporting correctional goals.
This article invites landscape architecture professionals to use existing knowledge, skills, and resources to enhance and transform the correctional landscape. We offer a seven-point action plan through three successful landscape design-build projects completed during a multiyear partnership between the Iowa Department of Corrections (IDOC) and the Department of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University (ISU) (Figure 1).
THE WELL-BEING OF INCARCERATED INDIVIDUALS AND CORRECTIONAL EMPLOYEES
The Grim Statistics
Individuals incarcerated in U.S. correctional facilities often exhibit poor physical and mental health and social well-being on their confinement, and face grim prospects on return to the community. More than 50% of incarcerated people cope with a mental health condition; 10–25% have serious mental health problems, such as major affective disorders or schizophrenia (Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014). The rate of mental health conditions in the general population in the United States is lower at 18.5% with 4% diagnosed with serious mental health illnesses (National Alliance on Mental Illness, 2016). Incarcerated women particularly struggle with mental health, with more than 70% experiencing such issues (Glaze & James, 2006), approximately twice that of nonincarcerated women (World Health Organization, 2016). In addition, 60–75% of men and women in correctional facilities have substance abuse issues, and nearly 30% have experienced physical and mental abuse (Glaze & James, 2006; Lynch et al., 2013). Comparatively, the rate of substance abuse disorders is about 8% and reported rates of emotional abuse is approximately 48% in the general population (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 2016; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2016).
Concern for the well-being of incarcerated individuals extends to their ability, on release, to support themselves and their families financially through gainful employment. Those at incarceration risk on average have less than a high school degree and low levels of literacy coupled with little work experience. In fact, 25–33% of all incarcerated people were unemployed before incarceration (Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014). Although most correctional facilities offer educational and work programs to prepare men and women for release, approximately half of formerly incarcerated individuals remain unemployed a year after their return to the community (Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014). The reasons for this bleak outlook are complicated, yet work programs show some promise for reducing recidivism and improving job prospects (Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014). Research on horticultural programs, discussed briefly later, suggests that such programming may achieve outcomes related to health and employability.
Correctional Employees: Increasing Stress, One Shift at a Time
Concern exists for the well-being of the more than 650,000 correctional employees nationwide (Stephan, 2008; Stephan & Walsh, 2011). They are on the front lines of experiencing and witnessing the violence that permeates many correctional institutions (Ferdik & Smith, 2017). Reports find that upwards of 70% of correctional officers have been exposed to violence (Denhof & Spinaris, 2016a) and approximately 40% have been injured in interactions with incarcerated individuals (Konda, Reichard, & Tiesman, 2012). The result is that more than 75% of corrections officers show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder or diagnostic symptom clusters (Denhof & Spinaris, 2016a) and approximately 20% show signs of “corrections fatigue” (Denhof & Spinaris, 2016b; Denhof, Spinaris, & Morton, 2014). Coupled with additional operational and organizational job stressors, corrections staff experience high levels of emotional exhaustion, burnout, depression, stress, and anxiety (Denhof & Spinaris, 2016a; Denhof, Spinaris, & Morton, 2014; Ferdik & Smith, 2017; Lambert et al., 2015). Experts in the well-being of correctional staff point to environmental solutions, including access to natural landscapes (Ferdik & Smith, 2017).
CORRECTIONAL LANDSCAPES
The HBO drama series Orange Is the New Black has attracted large viewing audiences by presenting a “window” into a women’s prison and the lives and relationships of incarcerated women. The correctional environment is represented as dehumanizing cinéma vérité: bare walls that divide crowded, harshly lit living spaces. In the few scenes that depict the prison’s outdoor spaces, we see landscapes of reduction: bare ground and layers of razor-wire-topped fences. With due regard for the disconnections between mediated drama and real life, the series has inadvertently (and fortuitously) raised awareness about the experiences of incarcerated women and, by extension, the design of correctional facilities. Many feel empathy for the characters and begin to reimagine the environment in which they live, including the outdoor landscape.
Literature on correctional design has primarily focused on the architecture of correctional facilities across centuries of criminal justice reform. The natural landscape is rarely, if ever, directly mentioned, an omission that speaks to how the removal from it was part of detainment and correction. For example, early facilities such as the Walnut Street Jail were designed to hold and control the “ruthless rabble” (Wener, 2012, p. 18), goals that were architecturally realized with large, congregate rooms, thick walls, and strong doors (Johnston, 2006; Wener, 2012). Containment and control required separation from community, including the natural landscape. In 1829, the Eastern State Penitentiary shepherded in a new era in which those who offended were seen as sinful individuals in need of repentance, not just containment. Solitary cells created an isolation meant to foster reflection and penitence, and the radial design allowed staff surveillance from a control command post and by walking the cell tiers (Johnston, 2006; Wener, 2012). Although incarcerated individuals accessed sunlight through skylights in cell ceilings and fresh air though cell-like outdoor yards (Johnston, 2006; Wener, 2012), they could not see or interact with the farmland that initially surrounded the facility. One could hypothesize that reformers believed that access to the natural landscape could distract an incarcerated person from their penitent goals. Modern facilities, designed using the Direct Supervision Model (DSM), emerged from the assumption that detained individuals, especially those confined before trial, deserve humane, safe, and healthy environments that minimize the punitiveness of typical correctional architecture (Wener, 2012). Correctional officers directly interact with incarcerated individuals on the living unit, which are “normalized” in appearance through the use of noninstitutional fixtures, furniture, and materials (Wener, 2012, p. 59). Although people confined in such institutions have access to yards of various kinds, the philosophical basis of detention does not warrant access to a natural environment. More recent justice philosophies, such as restorative justice, have led proponents to envision environments aimed at facilitating offender accountability. Such spaces more closely approximate community or healing centers and intentionally consider the role of the natural landscape in achieving correctional goals (Designing Justice+Designing Spaces, 2017; Smith & Baumann, 2016; Toews, 2006; 2016; 2018; van Buren, 2009).
Many contemporary correctional facilities, including the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women (ICIW), offer access to nature in the form of sustainability and animal programs (Bachi, 2013; Cooke & Farrington, 2016; Furst, 2006; Prison Pet Partnership Program, 2017; Sustainability in Prisons Project, 2017) and the outdoor environment, although this is limited and not in the form of intentionally designed landscapes designed using therapeutic principles. Facility yards are the most common means through which to access the outdoor environment. These yards typically consist of hard surfaces, such as concrete pads or tracks, and lawn areas. Even though the landscape improvements have not typically been treated as part of facility design, horticulture—in the form of farms and gardens—have historically been part of correctional environments (Lindemuth, 2007). From the early 1800s until recently, many facilities had gardens and large, productive farms intended to provide food and work opportunities for incarcerated individuals. Tending these farms or gardens, however, was not intended to be therapeutic or educational; rather, such work was punitive and meant to tire out incarcerated workers so they would not cause trouble. For example, Louisiana’s Angola Prison is one of the most infamous for the way offenders engaged in punitive farm work (Rideau & Wikberg, 2002).
Many correctional administrators began using gardens and farms differently at the turn of twentieth century; for instance, staff at Bedford Hills Correctional Center for Women (New York) introduced educational components into the gardens and livestock operations (Lindemuth, 2007). Educational efforts continue today in prisons and jails, including New York’s Rikers Island, where the GreenHouse program combines gardening with education and post-release job placement. There, cultivating the garden becomes a means by which to explore the cultivation of oneself (Jiler, 2006). Incarcerated participants in the master gardener program at Rye Hill prison (United Kingdom) “identifie[d] the significance of working in the garden to [their] recovery journey, illustrating the relationship between the environment and recovery” (Brown et al., 2015, p. 10). Another example is the work by Evergreen State College and Washington State Department of Corrections Sustainability in Prison Project, which offers statewide programming related to environmental sustainability education and skill development (Sustainability in Prisons Project, 2017).
Access to farms, gardens, horticultural programs, and simply natural outside views (real and simulated) positively affects the health, behavior, and job skills development of incarcerated people. Health benefits literature associated with access to nature (e.g., fresh air, sunlight, and contact with plants) suggests that the interaction with nature provides offenders with: a sense of hope and meaning, aggressive behavior reduction, social emotional status improvement, positive activity engagement, and vocational skills development (Baybutt & Chemlal, 2016; Flagler, 1995; Khatib & Krasny, 2015; Oregon Youth Authority, 2016; Patterson, 2013; Rice & Remy, 1998; Richards & Kafami, 1999; Toews, Wagenfeld, & Stevens, 2018; van der Linden, 2015). Staff may also experience reduced stress when they have views of nature and bond with other living beings (Farbstein, Farling, & Wener, 2012). Farms and production gardens, however, do not encompass all that the landscape offers for rehabilitation and restoration, for individuals and the environment.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN THE CORRECTIONAL ENVIRONMENT
The previous examples suggest that horticultural programs, farms, gardens, and real and simulated nature views in correctional institutions positively affect the health of incarcerated individuals and staff. Landscapes designed using current best practices and therapeutic landscape research may have similar impact. Few corrections-based landscape projects exist outside the work of Daniel Winterbottom and Clare Cooper Marcus. Winterbottom and students designed and built the mother/child garden at Bedford Hills Correctional Center for Women (New York) (Winterbottom, 2007). Cooper Marcus, well known for her work in healing gardens, also designed with students a hospice garden for the California Medical Facility in Vacaville (Cooper Marcus, 2006), which was approved for construction (Clare Cooper Marcus, email message to author, December 15, 2016). Healing gardens, sensitively designed to be spaces for reflection, restoration, reconciliation, and even memorialization, can be particularly important to include in the correctional landscape. Their real and metaphoric qualities have the potential to affect offenders and staff positively.
A landscape architecture literature review confirms the paucity of correctional landscapes project. For example, an online search for the words “prison,” “jail,” and “penitentiary” in Landscape Journal, spanning 1982–2016, yielded no articles referring to landscapes in correctional facilities. We suggest that landscape architecture professionals are uniquely poised to design holistic and innovative prison landscapes that address the multiple health needs of incarcerated individuals and staff alike, and we invite landscape architecture professionals to work inside correctional facilities and apply their knowledge, skills, and resources for this unique environment. Through three successful landscape design-build projects completed inside a women’s state prison, a landscape architecture team realized the importance and relevance of the seven actions presented here as viable considerations for the correctional environment. These seven practice-based action points are not new to landscape architecture; they are foundational to the field. What is unique is their relevance and application in the correctional environment. In the discussion that follows, we introduce the ISU landscape design-build projects and discuss the seven action points, extrapolating examples from a case study to illustrate the challenges.
CASE STUDY: THE DESIGN-BUILD COLLABORATION AT IOWA CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION FOR WOMEN
The design-build collaboration between the landscape architecture program at ISU, IDOC, and ICIW began in 2010 when the IDOC statewide director approached ISU for a planting plan for a new 32-acre, 888-bed minimum/maximum women’s prison campus, under construction at that time. Going well beyond IDOC minimal expectations of the initial client program, ISU faculty and students facilitated focus group meetings and design charrettes with incarcerated women, correctional staff (including administrators, security, and program staff), and design professionals. The resulting master plan (Figure 2), developed over several years, employed therapeutic, biophilic, and environmental psychology principles to provide a variety of restorative landscape spaces that balanced the needs and abilities of different populations while maintaining facility security. It includes a multipurpose outdoor classroom (MOC), a staff decompression area (SDA), and a healing garden (HG) for women living in the mental health units and expanded production gardens, all of which are now completed. The mother-child garden was designed, built, and opened in 2018; research is underway to understand its impact on visitors’ experiences.
The design for the first landscape design-build project was a MOC (Figure 3), which emerged through a collaboration among ISU faculty and students, ICIW treatment staff, and women assigned to intensive treatment programs. Students then constructed and planted the MOC alongside incarcerated women. The one-acre site in the heart of the campus applies biophilic principles by mimicking regional landscape forms using Iowa limestone. The space is comprised of native prairie vegetation, smaller wooded areas, and a skewed grid of paths mirroring the agrarian Iowa landscape. It features large, medium, and intimately sized spaces scaled for variety of activities, such as graduation ceremonies, group counseling, one-on-one counseling, or individual writing and reflection, respectively. The smaller spaces offer comfort in the face of the large scale of the prison campus. The angled, as opposed to sinuous, paths diverge from accepted therapeutic landscape principles to improve circulation and security sightlines. This is one change made because of the collaboration with the security team.
The SDA idea emerged after observations that staff decompressed from work, between shifts, in the parking lot (Figure 4). Focus groups revealed that officers wished to leave the prison grounds for their breaks to be outside the women’s view but lacked the time to leave and reenter through the security checkpoint. The resulting SDA is sited outside of the secure perimeter, near the staff entrance and parking lot. This location, still within sight of the women, is far enough away to provide a sense of privacy while still being close enough to the entrance for returning to work. As the vegetation matures, the sense of privacy will increase.
The HG (Figure 5) is a garden designed for women residing in the mental health care units. The garden is located immediately outside the mental health units so it can be viewed from women’s rooms and the interior courtyards and visited by those who are permitted to leave the unit. The garden features seating areas for use by women alone or with others, including with treatment staff for individual and small group counseling. Accessible planting beds encourage those with physical restrictions to engage in gardening activities. The garden positioning outside the unit and low vegetated mounds offer privacy so that the women, already experiencing a sense of vulnerability, are free from interactions with women in disciplinary segregation and the general population. Similar to the MOC, the HG includes clear circulation and sightlines to aid in security.
Action 1: Support the Holistic Personal and Social Well-Being of All, Including Incarcerated Individuals
Landscape architects design and build landscapes with consideration of health-oriented goals and the assumption that people can be profoundly affected by interaction with the environment, which then leads to “immediate and lasting therapeutic benefits” for those who use and interact with these spaces (CLARB, 2010, p. 15).
Access to preferred landscapes (or lack thereof) is part of a complex set of factors that affect human personal and social health and well-being for the way the natural environment meets our inherent biophilic needs. Indeed, “people’s physical and mental well-being remains highly contingent on contact with the natural environment, which is a necessity rather than a luxury for achieving lives of fitness and satisfaction even in our modern urban society” (Kellert, 2008, p. 4). Sound environmental sustainability practices can also positively affect human welfare on other levels, including in the social, economic, psychological, cultural, and physical spheres (CLARB, 2010).
Incarcerated individuals are still humans, and with the help of landscape architecture professionals, they can experience the personal and social benefits of highly preferred landscape typologies (Kaplan, Kaplan, & Ryan, 1998) (Figure 6). A correctional facility may seem to be an unlikely place for a preferred landscape, but human needs and preferences can manifest in the garden. Helphand notes that “from the long evolutionary perspective, our landscape preference and experience is that of a ‘survivor landscape,’ one that ultimately sustained life. It’s part of what makes us human” (2006, p. 213). In many ways, the garden represents a miniature and more comprehensible version of the larger world. During imprisonment, the landscape may provide incarcerated people with the opportunity to explore their thoughts; consider accountability for their actions; and cope with trauma, victimization, and experiences that may have contributed to their crime. A garden within the correctional landscape may “[represent] the ideas, either together or separately, of paradise, harmony, temptation, sin, and reconciliation” (Francis & Hester, 1990, p. 4), and thus may contribute to reflection, accountability, and rehabilitation. This may, in turn, reduce risk factors for recidivism and unsuccessful reentry (e.g., substance abuse, minimal education, and lack of marketable skills) and increase protective factors for successful reintegration and community life (e.g., prosocial identity and feeling of belonging) (Follingstad, 2009; Wilson, 2009). The possible link between the landscape and the achievement of rehabilitative goals may serve as an argument in support of using already stretched correctional budgets to design and build the landscape according to therapeutic and biophilic principles.
The landscape architecture team designed three ICIW gardens to create opportunities for the women to experience personal and social well-being. The team subsequently applied evidence-based design principles, adapted environmental preference, biophilia, and therapeutic garden theories in the designs. Research is currently under way to understand the health benefits of the gardens, and anecdotal evidence already suggests that the garden has healing potential. For example, one day the ISU landscape team arrived to a somber garden crew of incarcerated women who plant and maintain the gardens and learned that “Sarah,” who had been incarcerated for many years, had lost her battle with cancer. The ISU team offered to forgo working for the day, but the garden crew decided the garden was the best place to remember their friend. Together, the ISU team and garden crew planted yellow flowers and named one of the trees in the MOC in Sarah’s honor. The women expressed gratitude for the impromptu memorial and, to this day, often talk about Sarah’s tree.
“Josie” presents another example of healing potential. Josie, who had a history of violent behavior, was in a dispute with another incarcerated woman. Rather than turning to physical violence, Josie consciously chose to focus on the gardens because, as she said, being and working in the gardens calmed her, and she did not want to be removed from the crew. In this case, her involvement in the garden contributed to a safer prison environment, the results of which may carryover to other relationships inside and out of the prison community.
Action 2: Overcome Environmental Injustices by Promoting Environmental Integrity
Landscape architects serve as stewards of the Earth (Francis & Hester, 1990), seek to maintain and restore natural ecosystems, and advocate for environments that support a synchronistic and sustainable relationship between the planet and the public health of people (CLARB, 2010).
Environmental injustices are pervasive, however, particularly among vulnerable populations. Many incarcerated people, for example, come from neighborhoods with few green spaces (Spatial Information Design Lab, 2008). Their home communities are typically characterized by brownfields, highway bypasses, and public service buildings that are not environmental justice spaces. This dearth of outdoor landscapes, especially those designed with therapeutic and biophilic philosophies, may be part of what contributes to the poor health of incarcerated individuals as well as aggressive behaviors, fear, and crime (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001a, 2001b). Furthermore, the lack of green space may affect one’s ability to become a social change agent and be actively involved in community life (Kaplan & Kaplan, 2009). These personal, relational, and social outcomes have the potential to further marginalize individuals already on society’s edges. A neighborhood’s physical attributes reflect environmental injustice and may perpetuate social injustice. Exacerbating community-based environmental and social injustices, incarcerated individuals endure poor environmental conditions while confined to prison due to the architecture of punishment and public’s perception that preferred landscapes are an amenity, not a healthful necessity. The result is that correctional environments can suffer from misuse and neglect and are wholly lacking the ecological diversity necessary for sustaining life. Landscape architects are positioned to rehabilitate the prison landscape and those confined to it. This interplay between environmental and social justice manifested itself in the ICIW gardens.
The women’s dedication to the MOC has resulted in a rapidly successful prairie planting. Within the first year, a landscape that had previously consisted of lawn had attracted birds and butterflies. The MOC welcomed the first visit from the state bird (the eastern goldfinch, Carduelis tristis), a joyful memory shared by the ISU team and crew. The prairie plants also have a life outside of the prison; the women collect seeds for use in prairie reconstruction projects elsewhere in the state. The women speak to their appreciation and pride for the role they play in creating such an environment, especially for the connection it provides to the outside world. For example, “Leanna” took a deep interest in the prairie plants and started reading about them on her own. She initiated the original prairie installment expansion and dreams of working with prairie reconstruction projects on her release. With Leanna’s new knowledge and skills, she may more successfully return to the community and engage positively with it.
Action 3: Design With, not For, the Community
Landscape architects are professionals who “work to help build communities: their work significantly affects quality of life … [to help] people to engage in their surroundings, strengthening social cohesion, which in turn results in healthier, more dynamic, more resilient communities” at multiple levels (CLARB, 2010, p. 17). Achieving these goals requires landscape architects to use community-centered design processes while assuming the lead role in reenvisioning community spaces. An important aspect of community-centered design involves accounting for the needs of the most vulnerable groups and, only then, others in the community (Cooper Marcus & Sachs, 2013).
Correctional facilities are communities. Much like small towns, there are citizens, tradespeople, medical facilities, public utilities, “law” enforcement, administrative leadership, and other community services. Landscape architecture goals remain the same in this context—design the environment to be a healthy, dynamic, and resilient correctional community. The community-centered design commitment extends to this context, including consultation with the most vulnerable groups, which in this case refers to the incarcerated women.
The ISU landscape team committed to community-centered design throughout the design process by facilitating separate focus groups, including one with ICIW staff and IDOC administrators and another with incarcerated women. Both focus groups inquired about the same topics: how they use the existing correctional landscape and how they would like to change it. These questions yielded lengthy responses from the incarcerated women. They wanted to talk and socialize, cuddle (although this was forbidden), or play games and exercise. Their ideas for changes were not unlike those heard in typical community design projects—more color, flowering plants, shade, seating, and water elements. Staff members were more reluctant to respond, in part due to security concerns and change resistance. A few suggested that the incarcerated women did not need improved landscapes. Others requested similar features as the women, citing the need for staff to also have an enhanced workplace environment.
The information gained in the focus groups informed the master plan and the three therapeutic garden designs. The focus groups revealed that while most of the incarcerated women were allowed access to the outdoors from sunrise to sunset, they were restricted to walking on concrete paths or sitting at the limited number of picnic tables. In other words, they could not access the lawn or limited plantings. In response to these restrictions and limitations, the ISU team designed multiple landscape settings that offered choice in seating, views, and featured lawn mounds for sitting or recreating (Figure 5).
Action 4: Use Design Thinking to Transform the Correctional Environment
Landscape architecture professionals engage in design thinking throughout the design-build process. Design thinking, which is future- and change-oriented, creates solutions for social problems by interrogating critical questions and exploring potential solutions through environmental interventions. This process “taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices” (Brown, 2009, p. 4). Brown contends that design thinking “is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself” (2009, p. 4). Landscape architecture professionals are trained to look forward and embrace change. Indeed, the very nature of the work requires future thinking because many landscape designs will not reach their full potential for many years, if not decades.
A commitment to design thinking can positively affect the correctional environment. Many problems permeate the U.S. correctional system and the built correctional environment, such as overcrowding, overuse of solitary confinement, and costliness—all converge to do little to support an incarcerated person’s rehabilitation or reduce correctional staff fatigue. Politicians, citizens, and advocates alike call for correctional reform, but such efforts have little impact as new prisons are built that look, feel, and function similarly to their predecessors. Landscape architects, through design thinking, can offer a different vision for correctional landscape design, which may dramatically transform the forms and functions of correctional environments.
The correctional environment presents multiple unique design challenges, especially because it couples concern for safety and security, which challenged the ISU team to regularly use design thinking during design charrettes and presentations. The ISU team, for example, presented limestone seat walls, and the officers noted that these elements might make their jobs more difficult. For the officers, walls create visual and physical barriers that officers must literally hurdle when responding to an emergency, and the stones could be used as weapons or for hiding contraband. Rather than eliminate the walls, the team worked with the security director to address these concerns by binding limestone blocks with masonry adhesive, making it difficult (though not impossible) to remove the stones from the walls. Together, we developed guidelines for the height of walls and plantings that maintain security while preserving the desire for preferred landscape settings. These interdisciplinary conversations facilitated mutual respect and improved buy-in from correctional staff and resulted in a therapeutic environment and a safer community.
Action 5: Creatively Leverage Grants and Community-Based Resources to Benefit the Correctional Community
Landscape architecture professionals regularly maximize insufficient budgets and can be resourceful in securing grant funding and in-kind donations. Many design professionals have worked on project teams in which the landscape was the last aspect of the design to be considered and is often the first line item to be cut when budgets get tight as the project nears completion.
Correctional facilities are expensive to operate and function with limited resources and lean budgets. When budgets tighten, administrators rely on outside assistance such as money, volunteers, and in-kind donations to deliver correctional programs. Without such support, many programs are eliminated, with negative consequences for the offenders and community. For example, recidivism rates for those who participate in rehabilitative and therapeutic programs are lower than those who do not (Cooke & Farrington, 2016; Magor-Blatch, Bhullar, Thomson, & Thorsteinsson, 2014). It is critical to secure program resources that support rehabilitation.
Resource development to support therapeutic gardens is equally important, and the project was funded through a variety of means. IDOC funds covered costs requiring actual dollars, such as undergraduate and graduate research assistants and summer interns to help design and install the gardens. The ISU landscape team secured outside resources to cover other costs. Grants and community donations and deeply discounted materials, for example, covered most of the physical elements that make up the built landscape (plants, wall stone, soil). The MOC installation cost the IDOC and ICIW approximately $60,000, compared to the estimated $600,000, thanks to outside support and the active involvement of students and incarcerated women.
Achieving a balanced triple bottom line for sustainable landscapes requires evaluation of environmental, social, and economic aspects of the project such as “budget realities, cost-saving considerations, fiscal requirements and available technologies” (CLARB, 2010, p. 23). The ISU team and incarcerated women designed and built a health-promoting landscape for what it costs to incarcerate two women for one year ($32,000 per woman per year) (Patricia Wachtendorf, personal communication, February 2011). If this project helps two women achieve therapeutic or rehabilitative goals and subsequently stay out of prison, it has paid for itself.
Action 6: Use Empirical Evidence and Grounded Theory to Better the Prison Environment
Landscape architecture practice is grounded in research and evidence-based design, which informs design decisions and solicits buy-in from correctional administrators and incarcerated women. Deming and Swaffield define evidence-based design as “a process for the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence from research and practice in the making of critical decisions, together with an informed client, about the design of each individual and unique project” (2011, p. 239). Such design has been widely adopted in the health sciences (de Leeuw, 2009) and the links between health and environment have been critical in extending the paradigm into the design professions (Cooper Marcus & Francis, 1998; Deming & Swaffield, 2011; Worpole, 2007). Outside of the design professions and allied disciplines, such as environmental psychology, few people understand the science behind human connections to the natural world. They can articulate a love for the outdoors, but not empirically understand the source or impact of that appreciation. Evidence-based design use is imperative when working with vulnerable populations and limited resources if designs are to be effective and efficiently funded. Furthermore, educating clients and community partners about theories and evidence about landscape architecture may solicit their buy-in for projects that provide healthy, well-designed, and highly preferred landscapes as a necessity, not an amenity.
Correctional programs have long been guided by evidence-based models. Evidence-based design aligns with current correctional methods and the ISU team drew heavily on evidence to inform their work. The ISU team explored theories well known to landscape architecture and environmental psychology, such as prospect refuge (Appleton, 1996) and attention restoration (Kaplan, 1995). These theories have not always been used in correctional facility design, but in other settings, such as healthcare, they lend themselves well to the goals of rehabilitative and treatment programs. Designs based on these theories have been shown to increase self-esteem, reduce trauma symptomatology, and alleviate depression (Annerstedt & Währborg, 2011; Kam & Siu, 2010; Page, 2008). The team consulted with experts in the environmental psychology of correctional facilities. These consultations advanced knowledge about the research findings application in the prison context, given special considerations such as scale, security, and vulnerability of incarcerated individuals. Student designers combined this theoretical and empirical knowledge with information gleaned from focus groups with incarcerated women and prison staff to develop landscape design concepts. When presented alongside design proposals, the aforementioned theories gave credibility to the forms and functions expressed in the designs.
Action 7: Evaluate the Impacts of Correctional Landscapes after Design and Construction
Designers use postoccupancy evaluation and other evidence-based research methods to assess design success and determine landscape effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes. Such evaluation frequently involves direct observation and secondary source analysis, but given limitations of these techniques “may require information that can only be found by asking what other people have seen or experienced” (Deming & Swaffield, 2011, p. 72). Such evaluation is best served by transdisciplinary research partnerships that are better equipped to effectively address the complex and interconnected social and environmental problems represented in the landscape (Deming & Swaffield, 2011).
Correctional landscapes also require evaluation to ensure that the design process leads to the preferred landscape characteristics and achieves desired outcomes. Effectiveness evidence also bolsters the argument that preferred landscapes in correctional environments are a necessity, not a luxury, which may then influence correctional administrators to invest in the landscape. The authors on the transdisciplinary research team conducting ICIW research and evaluation represented the fields of landscape architecture, occupational therapy, criminal justice, and social work. The research protocols include descriptive surveys and qualitative interviews that inquire about the use and impact of the three design-build projects. Both method types include mapping favorite and least favorite places and walking routes through the landscape. Unpublished survey findings indicate that the majority of incarcerated women use the MOC in some way, with almost half using it daily. The women experience some degree of well-being while there (e.g., relaxation and calmness, renewed energy, clarity in thought, and focus). The staff use the MOC to a lesser degree. Qualitative results are currently undergoing analysis, and early analysis suggests that the incarcerated women did not appreciate the prairie landscape and would rather have a botanical garden. After they received information on the decisions made to design with those materials, women expressed greater prairie landscape appreciation.
CONCLUSION
Incarcerated individuals and correctional employees stand to benefit from landscape architecture’s professional involvement in correctional environments. Access to mental, emotional, and social benefits of well-designed landscapes does not require participation in structured horticultural or gardening programs, making the opportunity for interaction with nature a daily occurrence and within individual control. Like horticultural programs, the health benefits may positively affect the way incarcerated individuals “do time,” thus creating a safer environment for all members of the correctional community, including staff. Incarcerated persons who participate in the design, construction, and maintenance of landscapes gain vocational training skills and competencies that are marketable on release. Correctional staff, at risk for compromised mental health and elevated stress and fatigue, may experience relief from symptomology and develop nature-based coping strategies, subsequently improving their job satisfaction and commitment, which may also contribute to a safer and healthier correctional community. In addition to the person-level outcomes, landscape architecture professionals can improve the ecological integrity of correctional campuses and assist with improving the health of both the correctional and the local community through production gardens.
Correctional landscapes do not currently represent a significant practice area for landscape architecture professionals. In the design of new prisons, architects and engineers typically handle the landscape design, if requested by the client. Furthermore, many correctional administrators do not understand and therefore do not prioritize therapeutic landscapes in their operations. The result is a knowledge, practice, and resource gap that can be filled by landscape architects. Addressing this gap requires a unique collaboration between landscape architecture professionals and correctional administrators, as well as engineers and architects. The Iowa collaboration demonstrates a successful partnership in which correctional administrators recognize the therapeutic value of the landscape and committed funds to create landscape improvements and programming. Landscape architecture professionals and students committed their knowledge and design-build skills to create landscapes that support the well-being of incarcerated women and correctional staff. The collaboration effects have spread throughout the Iowa correctional system, evidenced by an expansion of the landscape improvements and programming into men’s prisons and administrators’ mindfulness about their health within the correctional environment.
Our call for landscape architects to get involved in designing and building the correctional landscape may be difficult, uncomfortable, and disconcerting to consider. The public often misunderstands landscape enhancements as beautification and subsequently interpret such enhancements at a correctional facility as an affront to crime victims and their suffering. Community members may resent that tax dollars are (or may be) used for landscapes they consider luxuries, or to which they themselves do not have access. Indeed, community members expressed similar reactions in response to ISU’s early design ideas. Correctional employees expressed similar sentiments. These perspectives create the opportunity for landscape architecture professionals, in collaboration with correctional administrators and incarcerated people themselves, to change the perspectives. For instance, the connection between the health-oriented effects of access to natural landscapes and correctional goals needs to be emphasized. Indeed, the ISU-IDOC-ICIW partnership, which includes incarcerated women and correctional staff, sought to use the landscape as a way to achieve IDOC goals related to creating “an Iowa with no more victims” and “advance[ing] successful offender re-entry to protect the public, staff, and offenders from victimization” (Iowa Department of Corrections, 2010, p. 4, 2012, p. 3). We contend that healthy and healing landscape access within the correctional environment is a necessity for the well-being and transformation of incarcerated individuals and correctional staff alike and not a luxury.
Others argue (see Jewkes & Moran, 2015) that landscape improvements only serve to put a beautiful veneer on an inherently problematic system, without addressing the trend of mass incarceration, racial disparities, and related social inequities. The construction of new “green” prisons like ICIW has received similar untoward responses (see Jewkes & Moran, 2015). Improving incarceration conditions in dilapidated facilities can be perceived as a notion of respect by some and simultaneously perceived as an unnecessary perpetuation of mass incarceration by others. Similarly, “the reshaping of custody around ideologies that purport to rehabilitate and responsibilize may be no less insidious than more traditional forms of discipline and control, for being part of a treatment modality packaged in moral and ethical rhetoric” (Brown, 2014, as cited in, Jewkes & Moran, 2015, p. 454).
The people of the ISU-IDOC-ICIW collaboration have witnessed firsthand the human impacts of systemic injustices and disparities, grappled with the utility of incarceration, and wondered if and how landscape architecture can be used to transform community and social conditions that have perpetuated this mass incarceration era. We seek wisdom from other built environmental professionals who refuse to build correctional facilities (ADPSR, 2018) or who seek to use the built environment as a means through which to challenge these trends and injustices by developing new design typologies and practices for noncarceral justice spaces (Designing Justice+Designing Spaces, 2017; Toews, 2018; van Buren, 2009). The operative assumption is that humans are capable of transformation, worthy of dignity and, no matter what they have done, deserve and require access to the natural landscape. This belief can also challenge the prevailing social belief that people in the justice system are inherently bad and less deserving than others. Indeed, the collaborative student designers realized the ways in which environmental and social justice can address social problems and increased their knowledge and investment in community-based issues related to corrections and sought solutions to those problems.
These perspectives all carry legitimacy and warrant consideration when enhancing or transforming the correctional landscape, and landscape architects may find themselves straddling two groups who are skeptical (if not vocally resistant) to this work. This precarious positioning of landscape architecture within the correctional environment, although uncomfortable, highlights how the profession has an important role to play in the correctional environment, the criminal justice system more generally, and social justice more broadly. Landscape architecture professionals bring knowledge, skills, and abilities to facilitate justice and healing for people who have been traumatized, victimized, and otherwise forgotten. This practice can occur in a variety of communities, facilities, and contexts affected by social injustices, such as community mental health facilities, schools, shelters for those who experience homelessness and intimate partner violence, and communities directly affected by mass incarceration.
Our call to landscape architects to work in the correctional environment is, more deeply, a call to get involved in communities and lead community design and construction projects to build healthier, safer, and more just communities for all, especially for those who typically do not have access to the natural landscape or who are at risk of justice system involvement. The landscape architecture profession should and can serve as an important ally in the transformation of individuals and communities when building just and healthy communities.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION
Each of the authors provided equal contribution while preparing and revising this article.
PEER REVIEW STATEMENT
This submission was peer-reviewed by four peer reviewers selected by the Editorial Office. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged and appreciated.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by the Iowa Department of Corrections, the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women, and the Iowa State Penitentiary. The projects would not have been possible without monetary donations from many individuals and in-kind support from local businesses. Research support was also received by the Social Work and Criminal Justice Program/University of Washington Tacoma. Related research was reviewed by and approved for completion by the Institutional Review Board at Iowa State University. This article and the work described was largely conceived through the shared vision created by Julie Stevens and Warden Patti Wachtendorf, who is a pillar of hope in the world of incarceration. To date, approximately 100 ISU students have participated in classes and design-build projects related to Iowa prisons. We thank you for your creativity and willingness to tackle this uncomfortable societal issue. Most importantly, it is with utmost respect and gratitude that we acknowledge the ICIW residents who welcomed us into their house to explore what seemed like an impossible mission, and, who have spent tireless hours designing, building, and maintaining the gardens that ensued.
Footnotes
Julie Stevens is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University, where she has developed an innovative student design-build program with the Iowa Department of Corrections to create therapeutic environments for prisons, including gardens for prison staff and incarcerated individuals. The team of students, prison staff and incarcerated individuals at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women received the Award of Excellence in Community Service from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2015 and 2018 for the Outdoor Classrooms and the Children’s Garden, respectively. Stevens is a founder of the ASLA’s Environmental Justice Professional Practice Network.
Dr. Barb Toews is an Assistant Professor in criminal justice at University of Washington Tacoma. Her research focuses on the relationships among criminal/restorative justice, architecture and environmental design, and psychosocial-behavioral-judicial outcomes for victims, offenders, and justice professionals. She has taught restorative justice and design courses inside correctional facilities and co-founded Designing Justice+Designing Spaces (DJ+DS), an initiative that engages incarcerated individuals in the design of justice spaces that promote accountability and victim and offender healing. Toews has numerous publications related to restorative justice, including its relationship to design. Prior to joining the academy, she held leadership positions in criminal/restorative justice non-profit organizations.
Amy Wagenfeld, PhD, OTR/L, SCEM, FAOTA is Associate Professor and Capstone Coordinator in the Occupational Therapy Doctorate Program at Johnson & Wales University. Her work focuses on design, programming, and evaluation of environments that support physical and emotional rehabilitation and learning in healthcare, community, senior living, military, correctional, children’s, and educational settings. Wagenfeld presents and publishes widely in peer-reviewed and popular press publications on topics relating to collaboration with designers and access to nature. She is co-author with Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA of Therapeutic Gardens: Design for Healing Spaces, published in 2015 by Timber Press and winner of the 2016 EDRA Great Spaces Book Award.
REFERENCES
In this issue
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- Article
- Abstract
- INTRODUCTION
- THE WELL-BEING OF INCARCERATED INDIVIDUALS AND CORRECTIONAL EMPLOYEES
- CORRECTIONAL LANDSCAPES
- LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN THE CORRECTIONAL ENVIRONMENT
- CASE STUDY: THE DESIGN-BUILD COLLABORATION AT IOWA CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION FOR WOMEN
- CONCLUSION
- AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION
- PEER REVIEW STATEMENT
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Footnotes
- REFERENCES
- Figures & Data
- Info & Metrics
- References