What a world without prisons could look like Deanna Van Buren
A lot of people call me
a “justice architect.”
But I don’t design prisons.
I don’t design jails.
I don’t design detention centers,
and I don’t even design courthouses.
All the same, I get a call every week,
saying, “OK, but you design
better prisons, right?
You know, like those pretty ones
they’re building in Europe.”
And I always pause.
And I invite them,
and I invite you today,
to imagine a world without prisons.
What does that justice feel and look like?
What do we need to build to get there?
I’d like to show you some ideas today
of things that we’re building.
And I’m going to start
with an early prototype.
This I built when I was five.
I call it “the healing hut.”
And I built it after I got
sent home from school
for punching this kid in the face
because he called me the N-word.
OK, he deserved it.
It happened a lot, though,
because my family had desegregated
a white community in rural Virginia.
And I was really scared.
I was afraid.
I was angry.
And so I would run into the forest,
and I would build these little huts.
They were made out of twigs and leaves
and blankets I had taken from my mom.
And as the light would stream
into my refuge,
I would feel at peace.
Despite my efforts to comfort myself,
I still left my community
as soon as I could,
and I went to architecture school
and then into a professional career
designing shopping centers,
homes for the wealthy
and office buildings,
until I stepped into a prison
for the first time.
It was the Chester State
Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania.
And my friend, she invited me there
to work with some
of her incarcerated students
and teach them about
the positive power of design.
The irony is so obvious, right?
As I approached this concrete building,
these tiny little windows,
barbed wire, high walls,
observation towers,
and on the inside,
these cold, hard spaces,
little light or air,
the guards are screaming,
the doors are clanking,
there’s a wall of cells filled with
so many black and brown bodies.
And I realized that what I was seeing
was the end result of our racist policies
that had caused mass incarceration.
But as an architect, what I was seeing
was how a prison is the worst
building type we could have created
to address the harm
that we’re doing to one another.
I thought, “Well, could I design
an alternative to this,
other than building a prettier prison?”
It didn’t feel good to me;
it still doesn’t feel good.
But back then, I just
didn’t know what to do.
What do we build instead of this?
And then I heard
about restorative justice.
I felt at peace again,
because here was an alternative system
that says when a crime is committed,
it is a breach of relationship,
that the needs of those
who have been harmed
must be addressed first;
that those who have committed the offense
have an obligation to make amends.
And what they are
are really intense dialogues,
where all stakeholders come together
to find a way to repair the breach.
Early data shows that
restorative justice builds empathy;
that it reduces violent reoffending
by up to 75 percent;
that it eases PTSD in survivors
of the most severe violence.
And because of these reasons,
we see prosecutors and judges
and district attorneys
starting to divert cases out of court
and into restorative justice
so that some people never
touch the system altogether.
And so I thought, “Well, damn –
why aren’t we designing for this system?”
(Applause)
Instead of building prisons,
we should be building spaces
to amplify restorative justice.
And so I started in schools,
because suspensions and expulsions
have been fueling the pathway
to prison for decades.
And many school districts –
probably some of your own –
are turning to restorative justice
as an alternative.
So, my first project – I just turned
this dirty little storage room
into a peacemaking room
for a program in a high school
in my hometown of Oakland.
And after we were done, the director said
that the circles
she was holding in this space
were more powerful in bringing
the community together
after fighting at school
and gun violence in the community,
and that students and teachers
started to come here
just because they saw it
as a space of refuge.
So what was happening is that the space
was amplifying the effects of the process.
OK, then I did something
that architects always do, y’all.
I was like, I’m going to build
something massive now, right?
I’m going to build the world’s first
restorative justice center all by myself.
And it’s going to be
a beautiful figure on the skyline,
like a beacon in the night.
Thousands of people will come here
instead of going to court.
I will single-handedly
end mass incarceration
and win lots of design awards.
(Laughter)
And then I checked myself –
(Laughter)
because here’s the deal:
we are incarcerating more
of our citizens per capita
than any country in the world.
And the fastest-growing
population there are black women.
Ninety-five percent
of all these folks are coming home.
And most of them are survivors of severe
sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
They have literally been
on both sides of the harm.
So I thought, uh, maybe I should ask them
what we should build instead of prisons.
So I returned with
a restorative justice expert,
and we started to run
the country’s first design studios
with incarcerated men and women
around the intersection
of restorative justice and design.
And it was transformative for me.
I saw all these people behind walls
in a totally different way.
These were souls deeply committed
to their personal transformation
and being accountable.
They were creative, they were visionary.
Danny is one of those souls.
He’s been incarcerated
at San Quentin for 27 years
for taking a life at the age of 21.
From the very beginning,
he’s been focused
on being accountable for that act
and doing his best to make amends
from behind bars.
He brought that work into a design
for a community center
for reconciliation and wellness.
It was a beautiful design, right?
So it’s this green campus
filled with these circular structures
for victim and offender dialogue.
And when he presented the project to me,
he started crying.
He said, “After being in the brutality
of San Quentin for so long,
we don’t think reconciliation will happen.
This design is for a place that fulfills
the promise of restorative justice.
And it feels closer now.”
I know for a fact
that just the visualization of spaces
for restorative justice and healing
are transformative.
I’ve seen it in our workshops
over and over again.
But I think we know that just visualizing
these spaces is not enough.
We have to build them.
And so I started to look
for justice innovators.
They are not easy to find.
But I found one.
I found the Center for Court Innovation.
They were bringing Native American
peacemaking practices
into a non-Native community
for the very first time
in the United States.
And I approached them, and I said,
“OK, well, as you set up your process,
could I work with the community
to design a peacemaking center?”
And they said yes.
Thank God, because
I had no backup to these guys.
And so, in the Near Westside
of Syracuse, New York,
we started to run design workshops
with the community
to both locate and reenvision
an old drug house
to be a peacemaking center.
The Near Westside
Peacemaking Project is complete.
And they are already running
over 80 circles a year,
with a very interesting outcome,
and that it is the space itself
that’s convincing people
to engage in peacemaking
for the very first time in their lives.
Isabel and her daughter are some
of those community members.
And they had been referred to peacemaking
to heal their relationship
after a history of family abuse,
sexual abuse
and other issues that they’d been having
in their own family
and the community.
And, you know, Isabel didn’t want
to do peacemaking.
She was like, “This is just
like going to court.
What is this peacemaking stuff?”
But when she showed up,
she was stressed, she was anxious.
But when she got in,
she kind of looked around,
and she settled in.
And she turned
to the coordinator and said,
“I feel comfortable here – at ease.
It’s homey.”
Isabel and her daughter
made a decision that day
to engage and complete
the peacemaking process.
And today, their relationship
is transformed;
they’re doing really well
and they’re healing.
So after this project,
I didn’t go into a thing
where I’m going to make a huge
peacemaking center.
I did want to have peacemaking
centers in every community.
But then a new idea emerged.
I was doing a workshop
in Santa Rita Jail in California,
and one of our incarcerated
designers, Doug, said,
“Yeah, you know, repairing the harm,
getting back on my feet, healing –
really important.
But the reality is, Deanna,
when I get home,
I don’t have anywhere to go.
I have no job – who’s going to hire me?
I’m just going to end up back here.”
And you know what, he’s right,
because 60 to 75 percent of those
returning to their communities
will be unemployed
a year after their release.
We also know, if you can’t meet
your basic economic needs,
you’re going to commit crime –
any of us would do that.
So instead of building prisons,
what we could build are spaces
for job training and entrepreneurship.
These are spaces for what we call
“restorative economics.”
Located in East Oakland, California,
“Restore Oakland” will be
the country’s first center
for restorative justice
and restorative economics.
(Applause)
So here’s what we’re going to do.
We’re going to gut this building
and turn it into three things.
First, a restaurant called “Colors,”
that will break the racial divide
in the restaurant industry
by training low-wage restaurant workers
to get living-wage jobs in fine dining.
It does not matter if you have
a criminal record or not.
On the second floor,
we have bright, open, airy spaces
to support a constellation
of activist organizations
to amplify their cry
of “Healthcare Not Handcuffs,”
and “Housing as a human right.”
And third, the county’s first
dedicated space for restorative justice,
filled with nature, color,
texture and spaces of refuge
to support the dialogues here.
This project breaks ground
in just two months.
And we have plans to replicate it
in Washington D.C., Detroit,
New York and New Orleans.
(Applause)
So you’ve seen two things
we can build instead of prisons.
And look, the price point is better.
For one jail, we can build
30 restorative justice centers.
(Applause)
That is a better use of your tax dollars.
So I want to build all of these.
But building buildings
is a really heavy lift.
It takes time.
And what was happening
in the communities that I was serving
is we were losing people every week
to gun violence and mass incarceration.
We needed to serve more people and faster
and keep them out of the system.
And a new idea emerged from the community,
one that was a lot lighter on its feet.
Instead of building prisons,
we could build villages on wheels.
It’s called the Pop-Up Resource Village,
and it brings an entire
constellation of resources
to isolated communities
in the greater San Francisco area,
including mobile medical,
social services and pop-up shops.
And so what we’re doing now
is we’re building this whole village
with the community,
starting with transforming municipal buses
into classrooms on wheels
that bring GED and high school
education across turf lines.
(Applause)
We will serve thousands
of more students with this.
We’re creating mobile spaces of refuge
for women released from jail
in the middle of the night,
at their most vulnerable.
Next summer, the village will launch,
and it pops up every single week,
expanding to more and more
communities as it goes.
So look out for it.
(Applause)
So what do we build instead of prisons?
We’ve looked at three things:
peacemaking centers,
centers for restorative justice
and restorative economics
and pop-up villages.
But I’m telling you,
I have a list a mile long.
This is customized housing for youth
transitioning out of foster care.
These are reentry centers for women
to reunite with their children.
These are spaces
for survivors of violence.
These are spaces
that address the root causes
of mass incarceration.
And not a single one of them
is a jail or a prison.
Activist, philosopher, writer
Cornel West says
that “Justice is what love
looks like in public.”
So with this in mind,
I ask you one more time
to imagine a world without prisons,
and join me in creating all the things
that we could build instead.
Thank you.
(Applause)