Punishment or Transformative Rehabilitation? Architectural Design and Management of Maximum-Security Prisons in the United States and Norway

This chapter providesTransformative Rehabilitation a comparative evaluation of two divergent paradigmatic approaches to crime and criminality in the Unites States and Norway; each nation’s options to deal with citizens who have committed crimes; and their solutions for the architectural design and management of incarceration centers, particularly the maximum-security prisonsMaximum-Security Prisons. By establishing the link between social justice and spatial justice in conceptualizing and designing prisons and administering social relations in these compounds; it is argued that the latter cannot be achieved in the absence of the former. This verdict is reached by focusing on two paradigmatic assumptions of social justice, namely, the conservative and liberal/left-of-the center approaches on how to treat citizens who have violated established legal and moral laws by committing crimes in the United StatesUnited States and NorwayNorway, respectively. In brief, while the former paradigm denies criminals their citizenship rights, focuses on “just” punishmentPunishment, and pays lip service to inmates’ rehabilitationRehabilitation; the latter bestows criminals’ inalienable citizenship rights and invests in their rehabilitation regardless of the severity of their crimes. Furthermore, while one uses the space to impose another layer of punishment on inmates who are already being punished through imprisonment by designing an oppressive and completely segregated incarceration  structures; the other acknowledges the need for inmate rehabilitation while in the state’s custody, and never denies them their right of access to a just space as citizens, nor does conceptually and literally segregate them from the rest of society.