The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails: Creating Humane Spaces in Secure Settings (Environment and Behavior)

This book distills thirty years of research on the impacts of jail and prison environments. The research program began with evaluations of new jails that were created by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which had a novel design intended to provide a nontraditional and safe environment for pretrial inmates, and documented the stunning success of these jails in reducing tension and violence. This book uses assessments of this new model as a basis for considering the nature of environment and behavior in correctional settings, and more broadly in all human settings. It provides a critical review of research on jail environments and of specific issues critical to the way they are experienced and places them in historical and theoretical context. It presents a contextual model for the way environment influences the chance of violence.

Richard E. Wener is Professor of Environmental Psychology in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, where he co-directs the Sustainable Urban Environments program and is a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers University Center for Green Building. He is a Fellow of Division 34 of the American Psychological Association and has served as president of Division 34. In 2010 Professor Wener was a Fulbright Fellow at the Vienna University of Technology. For more than thirty years Professor Wener has studied the way correctional architecture affects facility operations and the behavior of staff and inmates. This work began in 1975 with evaluations of the first of the 'new generation jails' - federal Metropolitan Correctional Centers in Chicago and New York. He has since conducted evaluations of dozens of prisons and jails and several large nationwide surveys of correctional facilities. He has consulted in the area of facility design and planning for adult and juvenile detention and corrections facilities. He was also part of a team that studied conditions of confinement to support revisions of American Correctional Association standards for the design of jails and prisons. His writing has addressed design and management features which serve to reduce violence, vandalism and stress in correctional settings by understanding the lessons of successful direct supervision facilities. Professor Wener's articles have appeared in journals such as Environment and Behavior, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Corrections Compendium, American Jails, Transportation Research (Part F), Transportation, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and Psychology Today. He has served on the editorial boards of Environment and Behavior, the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research and the Journal of Environmental Systems.