Architects Draw Line on Designing Jails Until America Repairs Racial Injustice

Real Estate Weekly: New York’s architects are threatening to stop designing jails unless the nation changes the way it treats Black, Brown and Indigenous Americans in the criminal justice system.

A day after the two men bidding to lead America into its next chapter called each other a racist, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York chapter issued a statement calling on architects to stop designing “unjust spaces of incarceration until there is measurable reform in America to apply the law without racial bias.”

The Chapter is calling on architects to move away from the design of spaces including prisons, jails, detention centers and police stations, and instead shift their efforts towards “supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies based on prison reform, alternatives to imprisonment, and restorative justice.”

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