NEW ORLEANS — Pres Kabacoff knows a thing or two about buildings. One of the city's most prominent developers, his company, HRI Properties, has built major projects around the country, including River Garden and the Blue Plate Artist Lofts in New Orleans.
But lately, wearing his civic activist hat, Kabacoff has been busy trying to prevent the construction of a building: the court-ordered Phase Three addition to house mentally ill inmates at the city's jail.
Kabacoff joined Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson's opposition to Phase Three when she made it one of her key campaign platforms in her upset election victory over previous Sheriff Marlin Gusman.
Among his misgivings is the so-called panopticon design, in which inmates’ cells are configured in a circle around a central command center. Jail experts say the panopticon robs inmates of dignity and increases anxiety by putting their distress on display for everyone else to see.
“It's designed by a circular panopticon,” Kabacoff said. “There's not been one of those built in the country in 20 years. They're all closed.”
“We have to be smart about this. And this is not smart,” he said.
The last panopticon prison in the country, at Stateville Prison in Illinois, was closed in 2016 after years of opposition. Jenny Vollen-Katz, a prison reform expert, helped lead the fight.
“To think that there is another jurisdiction considering building it new is just shocking,” she said.
Vollen-Katz said the design, in which inmates can be seen by nearly all other inmates, amplifies tension, anxiety and lack of privacy throughout the complex.
She said that inmates who are acting out or in distress are essentially on display in ways that can trigger copy-cat behavior or negative reactions by the other inmates. She said the design is also stressful for guards.
“It's been shown time and time again to aggravate mental health issues and to generally cause harmful chaotic reaction,” she said.
Yet under the 10-year-old federal consent decree to improve conditions at the jail, the court has ordered the panopticon version of Phase Three to be built.
Federal Magistrate Judge Michael North, along with the consent decree monitors and attorneys for the inmates, re-iterated their support for the Phase III plan at a court hearing two weeks ago.
North said the issue has already been resolved after years of litigation and “the time for discussion is long over.”
Hutson is trying to get the discussion over Phase III re-opened.
In a six-page letter to North and U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, Hutson objected to the design as “outdated” and “inhumane and dangerous.” She also points out that the price tag has ballooned from an original $40 million dollar estimate to about $115 million today. Hutson says that would cost $5 million per cell for 56 new prison cells.
“If I were to go into a bank and say I want to build a hotel or an apartment and I want to spend about two-million dollars a room, they would throw me out of the office,” Kabacoff said. “And so there's something wrong here.”
As an alternate plan, Hutson is advocating for an expansion of the jail's existing mental health wing – known as Temporary Mental Health or TMH – by renovating two vacant buildings using the same design. She estimates her plan would cost about $10 million dollars.
“Here, we have to do something better. And I just can't emphasize that enough,” Hutson said.
Last week, WWL-TV accompanied the sheriff as she gave a lobbying tour to advocate for her idea. Councilman Oliver Thomas was there and now he’s aligned with Hutson.
“Why are we in New Orleans doing a design that prison experts all around the world have said, first of all, should have been outlawed, shouldn't be used, is not the best design and at a cost of $80 to $90 million dollars more,” Thomas said.
He described the panopticon design plan as “medieval, total disregard for human dignity.”
Even though her legal options are narrowing, Hutson said she will fight until she exhausts all of her potential remedies.
“We're going to continue to fight the legal battle,” she said. “We're going to move forward with the briefings and all that. And I do have access to the court.”
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