Telephone Pole Design

The Design

Prison architecture always reflects in part larger societal ideas about the purpose of punishment. Thus, as ideas about incarceration change, so too does the design of penal institutions. In the first penitentiaries of the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems, incarceration was thought to lead to personal reform through a combination of solitary religious contemplation and labor. In these early penal institutions, prisoners did not move very far from their cells for the duration of their confinement. In the Pennsylvania system, for example, people spent their entire sentences alone in their cells. In the Auburn system, they labored together in silence in large halls adjacent to their cells. Gradually, however, it became more common for inmates to move from one part of the prison to another for classes, work, or rehabilitation programs. For this to happen, prison architects had to come up with a new design.

The telephone pole design allows inmate movement to occur under strict controls. All traffic from one area of the prison to another must pass through the central corridor, which is continuously monitored. Furthermore, areas within the institution are usually separated from one another by gates that staff members must lock and unlock. Guards control which inmates come into the central corridor and which are permitted in the different areas of the prison.

Because of the level of control over inmate movement that this design offers, as well as the way in which it holds all prisoners indoors, the telephone pole design is commonly used for maximumsecurity prisons in the United States and other parts of the world. Prisons constructed according to this design are also frequently used to house inmates according to classification levels. Different areas can be designated for those who are under special protection or for those who, as a group, have more privileges than other prisoners.

Examples

Completed in London in 1891, Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London is believed to be the first telephone pole design prison. It had four parallel buildings containing 1,244 cells. Interspersed between but also parallel to these cell buildings were workshops and a building containing a kitchen and a bathhouse. The workshops, cell buildings, and kitchen-bath building were all connected by means of a narrow passageway that cut through the center of each building. Although Wormwood Scrubs was older, Fresnes-les-Ringis, a French prison built in 1898, is considered to be the inspiration for many of the telephone pole-style prisons built after it. Francisque-Henri Poussin designed Fresnes-lesRingis to have six five-story buildings with cells to hold a total of 2,000 inmates. As is typical of prisons built in the telephone pole style, the cell buildings were connected by a central hallway that bisected each building. In Poussin's design, the chapel, service facilities, and administration buildings were also connected by corridors, but they were sited away from the buildings containing cells.

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