Shawn Connell
Professor Blomquist
Writing 101-15
4/16/12
Prison Architecture

Wallace Stegner once said, “Nothing in our history has bound us to a plot of ground [since] feudalism once bound Europeans” (Stegner 301). The only exception is being imprisoned. For those who brake society’s set laws, “Prisons and their many variants are built environments whose intended purpose is punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation” (Awofeso). Prisons began to be more widely used because the early Catholic Church disapproved of physical punishments. In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII authorized that incarceration and lack of liberty will take the place of the “eye for an eye” way of settling disputes previously employed (Awofeso). Today,
There is quite a list of possible negative psychological effects including clinical depression, paranoia, rage, helplessness, violence, and cognitive dysfunction to name a few (Haney). If Haviland knew of these side effects, maybe he would have designed the Eastern State Penitentiary differently.
Today, the average United States prison is quite different than the ideas of Haviland and Benthem. The prisons are known to have many negative trends. They usually tend to be very over crowded with two or more prisoners sharing a cell with men or women they have never met before living in close quarters with often one toilet in a cell with no privacy. Most are subjected to extreme violence and intimidation from both other inmates and often overworked staff. Many prisoners live in constant fear that they will be harmed physically or mentally by their peers. This type of prison system is not very effective. “Few people are completely unchanged or unscathed by the experience …[and] suffer long-term consequences from having been subjected to pain, deprivation, and extremely