Creating Spaces of Justice

One of the influencing factors to these numbers is the high rate of recidivism in the US, which is when an individual that has been released from prison re-offends and returns to prison. In the US, over 75% of returning citizens end up back in prison within 5 years of release.

Restorative justice emphasizes repairing the harm caused by a crime. Offenders, victims, other stakeholders and mediators come together to discuss what happened and how reparations can be made.

At the urban scale, the design addresses challenges of flows and access, the lack of a presence at the entry to Roxbury, and the disconnect between Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. To do this, the proposition creates a distributed vocational school as a community corridor that connects the neighborhood’s existing resources of parks and institutions with additional public amenities and spaces.

The design connects to the larger city network through the extension of the Southwest Corridor Park, and existing bus stops at each end of the intervention. The vocational school also traverses the boundary between Roxbury and JP, allowing access to a wider audience and allowing for economic benefits to reach Roxbury.

The architectural proposal is to create a family of types, based on each program, that both align with the existing context, and stand apart. To illustrate this, four key typologies are designed that make up the vocational school: the workshop, the service hub, the classroom, and the restorative justice space, which also have variations that are distributed throughout the campus. Each typology contains a few key architectural elements that vary depending on the program and the site of each building: The Path, The Canopy Structure, The Screen, The Building, and The Public Space.

The restorative justice space is elevated above the ground, to allow privacy for those in the space, while simultaneously providing views outward to the park, which is designed as a series of small intimate spaces.

The service hub is light architecturally, and creates a space for mobile services, such as food, health care, legal, as well as mandatory drug testing. Located at the edge of Roxbury, this service hub also anchors the campus on the urban scale.

The workshop type is made up of a workshop, an outdoor work-yard, a commercial space, and a public space. In this case, the woodshop provides technical training in machinery and woodworking, while creating furniture to be sold in the commercial space, and to populate the public seating space.

In the classroom type, the path, which is made from tiles painted by local residents cues the public to the public space. As opposed to the harsh concrete walls and chain link fences of adjacent properties, the path continues directly into each intervention. The gradient of the tiles, in combination with the gradient of the screen above, distinguishes how public spaces are. The public space, in this case an outdoor gym with jumbo monkey bars, interlocks with the architecture, to create a closer relationship between public and private spaces, while still maintaining privacy within the building.