This article was written by Tamar Sarai for Prism.
The first 72 hours after someone is released from prison or jail are considered by researchers to be the most impactful in determining a successful reentry. It is within this narrow window that someone must connect with counseling and supportive services, find safe housing, and explore employment prospects. Yet many struggle to access the very levers of support that are crucial to helping them thrive and start on a path toward long-term stability.
In recent years, leaders in fields that are perhaps not traditionally associated with reentry services have been developing innovative ideas on how to meet the needs of communities returning home. These organizations are not only providing direct support for formerly incarcerated people, but also encouraging the public to rethink the role of incarceration and see how deeply the carceral system fails those within it.
This summer, organizations in the design field have exemplified this approach and collaborated on inventive projects in service of formerly incarcerated communities. Taken together, these projects represent a growing and increasingly impactful network that is reshaping what reentry can and should look like.
“The reality is that folks who have a record are one of the only groups of people that it is still OK to discriminate against when it comes to housing,” said Deanna Van Buren, the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), at a talk hosted at Cooper Union in New York City earlier this year. “It’s hard to get housing, but housing is fundamental to the success of their reentry, so it doesn’t make any logical sense.”
DJDS, an Oakland-based architecture and design firm, real estate development firm, and nonprofit that aims to end mass incarceration and structural inequity, has been at the forefront of this work. DJDS projects aim to answer the central question, “What can we build instead of prisons?” By collaborating with local nonprofits as well as a similarly innovative design company, DJDS’ latest projects have illuminated the possibilities of abolitionist architecture largely by constructing spaces for restorative justice and compassionate reentry.
Architects of reentry
From November 2024 until Aug. 10, DJDS presented one of the firm’s most well-known projects in an installation within the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s “Making Home” series. In addition to featuring information about their design and development process, DJDS’ “Architecture of Reentry” installation allowed visitors to explore two of the firm’s full-sized mobile refuge rooms.
Designed for individuals recently released from prison and jail, the refuge rooms serve as a transitional living space for people to get connected with supportive services, find jobs, and restabilize before fully reintegrating into their communities back home.
“This [project] came out of looking at the money, looking at the need for housing, and looking at the fact that ground-up construction is expensive and so we need to repurpose existing infrastructure for this,” Van Buren said during the talk. “[Formerly incarcerated people] need dignity and privacy in this situation, and we need to also figure out how to pay for it. So we figured, could we start to create a room that would provide that at a fraction of the cost of stick-built construction?”
The size of the rooms allow them to be installed into existing infrastructures like auditoriums, vacant floors of office buildings, and within nonprofit organizations with existing reentry programs, such as San Francisco’s new restorative justice hub. The initial prototypes were developed following a workshop with formerly incarcerated students at Oakland’s Laney College in 2019.
Prism toured the exhibit in July. Each room is replete with a twin bed, a desk, shelving, a clothes closet, drawers, and a small window. Beneath the simple designs, though, are a host of careful considerations borne out of direct input from formerly incarcerated consultants.
The beds, for instance, are installed Murphy-style, enabling residents to pull them up and create more space to host friends or just move about more freely. Given the small size of the room, easily manipulable furniture is a must. Removing protruding handlebars and using sliding doors also created more space and seamless lines throughout the rooms; drawers and closet doors don’t have push-pull levelers but rather stylish cutouts for residents to grip and pull.
Other features represent intentional attempts to resist design elements that might be common in carceral facilities. For example, the designers made sure not to place beds in front of the door, a safety consideration inspired by conversations with formerly incarcerated individuals based on their experiences inside. Additionally, the glass material used for the windows and sliding front doors allows light to flood into the rooms while also being opaque enough to maintain the privacy of residents.
During a tour of the installation, Van Buren spoke to Prism about the importance of including a lot of shelving in the room, allowing residents to display personal items, including those they might have recently purchased or been gifted, as well as those they acquired during their time inside. Those items, along with planters, help add deeper sentiment to the rooms and represent a dramatic departure from prison and jail cells, which are often devoid of color and rarely able to be personalized.
“Architecture of Reentry” exists among a slew of recent efforts of DJDS to connect directly with the public. The installation—much like their 2021 virtual exhibit—encourages conversations about the relationship between architecture and abolition, to consider what an ecosystem of care would actually look and feel like, and, in doing so, better understand what Van Buren referred to on the tour as the “somatic dimensions of healing.”
DJDS projects stand to have meaningful implications for the design world as architects navigate a growing tension. Analysts predict that the national prison population will decline as much as 60% in the next 10 years, due to reforms in areas such as sentencing and parole, among others. Due to this anticipated decline, some states have begun to map out plans for prison closures. However, there are also vigorous calls on the federal level to promote tough-on-crime policies.
Those in the architectural field are beginning to reckon with this tension by more seriously engaging in discussions about what role they will play in either eliminating or fueling carceral projects.
Van Buren told Prism that that architects and construction firms are increasingly aware of the desire and need for projects that advance the work of abolition.
“People are beginning to understand the role of the built environment in healing,” said Van Buren.
For instance, in 2020, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, a national organization that advocates for ecological, justice-oriented, and sustainable design, successfully won a six-year campaign to petition the American Institute of Architects to ban the design of spaces for execution and solitary confinement.
Thought behind furniture
Through a partnership with Formr, a California-based furniture company whose ethos and mission are also related to ideas of renewal and redemption, DJDS has both outfitted their mobile room developments with products crafted by formerly incarcerated artisans and created new opportunities to raise money, funds, and awareness for compassionate reentry services.
Launched in 2020, Formr operates differently from traditional furniture suppliers in that all of the materials produced are made from materials salvaged from construction sites. Additionally, Formr staff are all from historically disadvantaged communities. The designers and carpenters employed by the company include formerly incarcerated individuals, people who have previously been unhoused, former gang members, and others who are hoping for a fresh start but are often locked out of employment opportunities.
The idea to use upcycled products came to Formr founder Sasha Plotitsa after working at a construction site with a troubling ecological footprint. Plotitsa recalled piles of debris being hauled away and not meaningfully repurposed. When developing the idea for Formr, he told Prism that there was an opportunity to divert those materials from landfills and use them to create furniture and other bespoke items. He felt that Formr had the potential to extend that philosophy to staffing as well.
“When you come out [of prison], you have to build your life up again, and you have the challenge of finding employment because now you have a record, and there’s a lot of stigma associated with that,” Plotitsa told Prism. “So it kind of made sense to focus on that population to provide those opportunities. That’s kind of where the two met: the materials and the workforce.”
When Plotitsa was connected to DJDS, he considered it a mission-aligned partnership. DJDS staff selected specific items for the refuge rooms from Formr’s catalogue with an eye for items that are multifunctional and work well in small spaces. One featured item, a multipurpose laptop desk, is among Formr’s most popular items. DJDS refuge rooms also feature Formr planters, encouraging residents to incorporate greenery in their new homes.
“Coming out of incarceration, to have that type of a space that can be their own is really an exciting concept,” said Plotisa. “I love the idea because people that are coming out typically end up in some type of shared living space, halfway houses, or other types of environments that are, in a way, an expansion of their experience of being incarcerated.”
Plotisa said that’s a challenge some of his own employees have had. “Those refuge rooms help humanize that process a little bit more and give folks more of a smoother transition.”
In addition to furnishing the mobile rooms, earlier this summer, Formr and DJDS also worked together on “Healing Forest Tables,” a limited-edition table collection made available to the public. Proceeds for the collection were donated to A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization that connects individuals returning home with independent housing, case management, pro bono legal services, and leadership development opportunities.
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
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