This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
11 min read
Two cubes of pale wood sit on either side of a small, accessible lounge. Inside each, a bed folds down from the wall, a desk swings out and shelves hold books, plants and family photos. But nobody lives here — at least, not yet.
What I and dozens of other visitors are looking at is the Mobile Refuge Room installation at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Making Home exhibition — trauma-informed transitional housing created with, and by, formerly incarcerated people and the architecture firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS).
The space is clutter-free and the modular nature of the rooms enables them to be staged differently, as has been done here. It looks simple, but it offers what most halfway houses still withhold: the ability to shape your space, decide who comes in, and ultimately close the door behind you.
“Decent housing is foundational to a successful transition home,” says abolitionist architect and DJDS cofounder Deanna Van Buren. Too often, she argues, that foundation is missing.
A Department of Justice study of more than 90,000 people released from state prisons across 34 states in 2012 found that 62 percent had been rearrested within three years, rising to 71 percent within five.
“The ability to secure housing and employment is the cornerstone of successful reintegration,” says Lila Kazemian, a criminology professor at CUNY researching desistance, the process of abstaining from crime by those with a previous pattern of offending.
Yet housing remains one of the most fragile parts of that equation. People with criminal records are still excluded from many rentals and public housing programs. Van Buren notes that formerly incarcerated people remain effectively an “unprotected class” in housing, which means discrimination is easy and consequences are rare. The National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction documents more than 44,000 legal restrictions on people with criminal records across U.S. jurisdictions, many related to housing.
With these restrictions, many people coming home from prison are left with crowded shelters, profit-driven reentry hostels, or the couches of already stressed relatives. For-profit prison companies run some of the largest reentry housing programs, often packing people into dorms because “that’s how they make a profit,” as Van Buren puts it.
In those spaces, you are watched. Your bed is assigned. Your roommate is assigned. Your schedule is assigned. The built environment continues the logic of incarceration, even after you’ve supposedly left it.
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In a former life, Van Buren was a globetrotting architect working on large, complex developments across several continents. Over time, she clocked the same jarring panorama: “You’re doing this huge development, and right next to it are these slums,” she recalls. “Why are we only designing for rich people?”
The real pivot came when she heard acclaimed civil rights activists Angela Davis and Fania Davis speak in Oakland about restorative justice. “I’d never heard of it before,” she says. “I was sitting there thinking, I want to design for that.” When she went looking for examples of spaces built for peacemaking and repair instead of courts and cages, she found almost nothing.
The journey to exhibiting at the Cooper Hewitt was a collaborative one for Van Buren, the foundations of which were laid in a cross-disciplinary partnership she and restorative justice scholar Barb Toews forged over a decade ago. They taught a course in a Pennsylvania prison consisting of 10 Haverford College students and 10 incarcerated men, asking participants to envision what spaces for healing might look like.
As participants created collages and small models, Toews noticed something else happening: The act of imagining new rooms and landscapes was helping people process trauma in real time, not in spite of the design work but through it. Design became the catalyst for talking about safety, fear, shame and hope, without asking people to start with words.
Years later in Oakland, DJDS teamed up with a Black church and a reentry program provider to imagine a full reentry campus and, within it, a different kind of room. Dozens of formerly incarcerated people joined community workshops; a core group became the design team now known as Designers on Deck. In those sessions, held in church halls, they sketched, argued over details and built cardboard models that eventually became the full-scale plywood prototype that was on display at the Cooper Hewitt.
The Pennsylvania prison experience also shaped how Van Buren now talks about her own role. “I’ve never been incarcerated,” she says. “My job as the architect is to translate your needs and values into physical form. You already know what you want. You already know what you need in an environment.”
As a result, people who have lived through incarceration are treated as the experts, while the architect’s job is to listen, teach just enough design language and help bring their ideas into physical form.
