Measures of Restraint: The Remaking of Carceral Space in the Postwar United States

Abstract

This article describes how architects working for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons developed a universal technical vocabulary for prison construction in the years following the end of the Second World War. Employing the neutral, streamlined aesthetic and advanced techniques of contemporary architecture, the new style negated the traditional formal distinction between the prison and extra-institutional space. Penal reformers celebrated the new institutions as signifying a shift away from the brutal, dreary institutions of the last century toward a more humane, efficient system of penal treatment. The neutralization of the prison, however, belied the subsumption of carceral violence into the form of the institution itself. The technical decomposition of the human form in contemporary design practice refigured punishment as a series of gradually intensifying strictures.