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comment AIA Aims to Green the Justice System
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has established a Sustainable Justice Committee to promote environmental responsibility in the planning, design, and construction of law and justice facilities, including judicial complexes, courthouses, police stations, prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers.
Photo courtesy Tim Griffin
The Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse, in Eugene, Oregon, earned a LEED Gold rating in 2006. Designed by DLR Group and Morphosis, the building houses six courtrooms and two judicial library spaces in addition to judges’ chambers and several offices.
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The committee, situated within AIA’s Academy of Architecture for Justice, is co-chaired by Susan Oldroyd, AIA, an associate at RossDrulisCusenbery Architecture, and Kenneth Ricci, FAIA, president of RicciGreene Associates. Oldroyd says the committee plans to hold lectures and conferences as well as publish a guide to greening justice facilities. The committee also hopes to work with the U.S. Green Building Council to develop a LEED rating system for justice facilities, which it envisions calling LEED-J.
Several design constraints make the standard LEED rating system difficult to use for detention facilities, says Ricci. For example, glass-clad polycarbonate glazing, which resists bullets and bomb blasts, “has very poor energy performance,” he says. Daylighting is also tricky, though Ricci promotes a system consisting of “cells arranged around a two-story dayroom with large windows facing an outdoor recreation area.” He combines this with vandal-proof furniture, colorful materials, low noise levels, and good sightlines for officers. “It works,” he says.
Ricci would also like LEED-J to promote systems analysis in predesign to limit the size of new jails. “For example, government officials can reduce the building footprint by adopting a new perspective, asking themselves not how large their new jail should be, but how small it can be without compromising public safety.” Ricci has convinced clients to reduce the number of beds in new jails through strategies including speedy arraignment, alternative dispute resolution, and rapid case disposition. “These strategies could be calibrated,” he says, “and should be recognized as sustainable initiatives.”
This message resonates with Raphael Sperry, AIA, who heads up a prison design boycott through Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), based in Berkeley, California. “ADPSR’s core argument is that it’s just not sustainable—financially or socially—for a country of 300 million people to keep 2.3 million people in jail,” says Sperry. The per-capita incarceration rate in the U.S. is the highest in the world, he says, and eight to ten times higher than that of any other industrialized country. More than 900 people have signed ADPSR’s pledge not to design prisons.
Sperry stresses that ADPSR fully supports the greening of courthouses and police stations and notes that his organization doesn’t oppose the greening of prisons but rather focuses on reducing their use in the first place. The best way to reduce the environmental impact of the prison system would be to shrink the system, he says, “and you don’t need a LEED scorecard for that.” ADPSR has recently participated in discussions surrounding a new execution chamber proposed for California’s San Quentin prison, and Sperry uses this case to explain his lack of support for greening prisons. “Would finding a more energy-efficient means of electrocution have a valuable environmental benefit?” he asks. “When you object to the premise of something, reducing its environmental footprint is kind of beside the point.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum are critics who believe that prisons ought to be miserable places, and that employing green strategies would, to some extent, work against the purpose of detention facilities. Both Sperry and Ricci reject this viewpoint. “Losing one’s freedom is punishment enough,” says Ricci. “If we have to incarcerate as a last resort, then we ought to do it in as humane a fashion as we know how.”
This article was produced by BuildingGreen, Inc.- www.buildinggreen.com
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