Death Penalty News

Psychiatrist Christine Montross has spent years treating people with serious mental illnesses — sometimes in hospitals, other times in jails or prisons. "The patients that I was seeing in my hospital were indistinguishable many times from the men and women that I was evaluating in jail," Montross says. "But the environments were so markedly different. One [is] charged with ... trying to help and heal, and the other [is] really designed to control and punish." Montross is a 2015 Guggenheim fellow and an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University's medical school. In her new book, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration , she writes that in the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than they are to be treated in a psychiatric hospital — despite the fact that incarceration often makes mentally ill people worse. "People who are mentally ill to begin with ...

Like many organizations in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the board of the American Institute of Architects issued a statement the other day expressing solidarity with protesters — and offering a mea culpa. “We were wrong not to address and work to correct the built world’s role in perpetuating systemic racial injustice,” the statement said. But “we support and are committed to efforts to ensure that our profession is part of the solution.” To that end, the statement added, “we will review our own programs” and “ask our community to join us and hold us accountable.” That’s good to hear. So, for starters, how about stop repeating that it’s OK by you for architects to design death chambers and solitary confinement cells in racially biased prisons that incarcerate and execute an overwhelmingly disproportionate percentage of African-Africans? Several years ago, I wrote about a petition filed with the A.I.A. by an organization called Architects/Planners/Designers for Soc...

Austria has unveiled plans to "neutralise" the building where Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler was born, by turning it into a police station. The government bought the building under a compulsory purchase order in 2016 after a lengthy dispute. Officials announced it would be turned into a police station in November. Now an Austrian architecture firm will carry out the changes designed to stop the site, in Braunau on the border with Germany, attracting neo-Nazis. "A new chapter will be opened for the future from the birth house of a dictator and mass murderer," Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer told reporters on Tuesday. RELATED | Hitler's old house gives Austria a headache The winning company - Marte.Marte, picked from among 12 candidates - submitted a plan which will cosmetically change the façade of the building and give it a new roof.  Work is expected to be completed by 2023 and will cost about €5m ($5.6m; £4.5m). ...

"Architects should not design spaces for solitary confinement. It's a form of torture that's recognized by the entire international human rights community. We're enabling and frankly participating in human rights abuse." The number of prisons in the U.S. has exploded from nearly 500 in the 1970s to almost 2,000 today, becoming a source of business for the architects who design them. But some in the profession are urging fellow architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prison, saying that doing so perpetuates human rights abuses.  NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent David Tereshchuk reports. DAVID TERESHCHUK: California-based architect Raphael Sperry has mounted a campaign. He wants his fellow-architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prisons – and execution chambers, too. RAPHAEL SPERRY: If you're hiring an AIA architect, we are like the best. We're committed to the highest standard… DAVID TERESHC...

‘Thank you for taking your time to hear my voice, because our voices are rarely heard.’ Given unusual access to California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, one of the most notorious super-maximum security prisons in the United States, the filmmaker Cali Bondad and the reporter Gabrielle Canon interviewed several inmates in solitary confinement, also known as the Special Housing Unit (SHU).  The resulting short film, Our Voices Are Rarely Heard , powerfully juxtaposes images of incarceration and freedom as inmates describe the monotony, hopelessness and anguish that characterise spending 22.5 hours of every day in the confines of an 8ft by 10ft cell – roughly the area of a king-size bed. Director: Cali Bondad, Producer: Gabrielle Canon Is It Ethical for Architects to Build Solitary Confinement Cells? Activists say no, but the industry's Code of Ethics says yes. ​Yesterday [This article was originally published in Jan. 2015], the American Institute of Archi...

Nevada Death Chamber Nevada officials are contracting with a Las Vegas firm to design a new execution chamber at the Ely State Prison. The state Board of Examiners voted Tuesday to approve a $94,000 contract with the architectural firm Kittrell, Garlock and Associates.  The funds will go toward remodeling a courtroom area and part of the visitation area to accommodate executions. Nevada lawmakers approved $860,000 this spring for a new execution chamber.  The state's existing death chamber at the shuttered Nevada State Prison in Carson City is not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and state officials have said for about 4 years that they wouldn't be able to carry out capital punishment there. Executions remain rare in Nevada, which has only carried out the death penalty 12 times since 1977. Source: Associated Press, December 9, 2015 - Report an error, an omission: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com - Follow us on Facebook a...

Ely State Prison, Nevada Nevada has more than 80 men on death row but no suitable place to execute them should the state need to carry out capital punishment, a panel of lawmakers was told last week. So lawmakers again are being asked to fund a new execution chamber at Ely State Prison so Nevada can be prepared to carry out a lethal injection should a court order be issued. The facility in remote eastern Nevada is the state's only maximum security prison. Greg Cox, director of the Department of Corrections, acknowledged in a budget hearing last week that no executions are in the offing. But if a court orders an execution, the agency would have only between 60 and 90 days to carry it out, he said. An execution potentially could be carried out at the now-decommissioned Nevada State Prison in the capital, but litigation over the use of the death chamber at the facility would be anticipated, he said. Cox made his pitch for about $829,000 to build a new execution ch...

Death row cell, Polunsky Unit, Texas The Quakers were among the first Americans to devise the idea of solitary confinement based on the notion that a life of quiet contemplation was the best way to help people improve their moral character. Inmates went through meals and work in complete silence, with only the Bible to feed their thoughts. The word "penitentiary" comes from the root of the word "penance," reflecting the original attitude that isolation was a way to rehabilitate. Today, thanks to modern technology, entire super-maximum security prisons are built where human contact is strictly limited and the idea of rehabilitation is almost entirely absent. The use of solitary confinement has become a topic of humanitarian concern, with both the United Nations  and Amnesty International condemning America's reliance on the practice, which violates international human rights norms and, they argue, constitutes torture. Psychologists agree that even jus...