As a prelude to the contemplation of the ugliest building in New Hampshire, consider two observations made by the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, his celebrated first-person account of life as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps.
“The best of us did not return,” Frankl confessed. “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who . . . had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends in order to save themselves.”
But, Frankl recalled, those who did manage to endure the unspeakable horrors “experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.” He described a fellow prisoner running into his barracks to implore his dead-tired comrades to run outside and gaze at the sunset through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods – “the same woods,” Frankl dryly notes, “in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant.”
“Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, with the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’”
How much could the immediate neighbors of this camp have known of any of this? Similarly, the ugliest building in New Hampshire is actually a complex of structures that, to judge from comments made on a recent tour for participants in the Leadership New Hampshire program, surprises visitors by its very existence. “Gee,” went one typical remark. “I never had any idea that all of this was back here.”
But 1,400 people live there, on North Main Street in Concord. At that address has stood, since 1880, the New Hampshire State Prison, now known as the New Hampshire State Prison for Men.
Nobody would equate those 1,400 inmates with Frankl and his fellow holocaust victims. The rule of law, not hatred and genocide, determines who is sent to the State Prison. Conditions there are humane. But if one accepts, as Frankl did, that one had to be immoral to survive in a concentration camp, then it follows that all inmates should be permitted the occasional glimpse of beauty despite their failings.
The State Prison has been designed expressly to make it very difficult for that to happen.
From the street, the State Prison retains a certain solemn beauty typical of 19th century lockups, from an era in which prisons were frequently labeled “penetentiaries” – places where the penitent could sit in solitude and contemplate their crime. The sharply hipped roof, the stolid brickwork, the big arched windows of a solemn, deliberately awe inspiring sort -- all of this testifies to a Victorian design sensibility calculated to make a statement about the majesty of the state.
Today those big windows have been largely bricked in, the glass openings reduced to slits. It’s a good metaphor for what’s inside – all the result of a bonanza of prison construction in the 80s and 90s. According to the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, driving that bonanza was a staggering 600 percent increase in New Hampshire’s prison population since 1981, while New Hampshire’s overall population grew by only 35.5 percent.
What were once the massive cell blocks behind those big windows is now space devoted to the prison infirmary, classrooms, offices and other support services. The living spaces themselves have been moved to the rear of a vastly expanded prison yard, so they are invisible to those outside the walls.
At the north end of the yard is the Hancock Building, a housing unit that resembles, and is, a hastily constructed warehouse. The rest of the living units are fan-shaped and jammed together in a zig-zag pattern that is only apparent from above.
The windowless “chow house,” where food is served to those inmates allowed to leave their cells to eat, is at the heart of this agglomeration. Dominating it visually, as one approaches it from the yard, is a huge series of wide outdoor ramps designed to provide accessibility to the eating facility.
Architecture always communicates. The message here seems to be that, where once we built prisons to evoke penitence and remorse in the face of stern justice, now all we care about is getting prisoners in and out without being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A few feet away are inmates who lack the privilege to use this ramp because they are so violent they have earned a spot in the super-max unit. The architectural aphorism “form follows function” does not apply here, given that these inmates remain in locked in their cells 23 hours a day, unless the purpose truly is the kind of sensory deprivation that leads to madness. The corridors are gloomy, designed so that the door of each cell overlooks nothing.
Cell windows are likewise tiny and open to small, barren, concrete-walled courtyards formed by the hub-and-spoke arrangement of this bunker-like structure. Inmates spend that precious one-hour of outside time either in such a lifeless outdoor zone or in similarly claustrophobic and featureless dayrooms.
The New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies has identified two reasons for the explosion in New Hampshire’s prison population. “What is not driving the growth in the state prison population is any apparent growth in serious crimes in New Hampshire,” according to a 2004 report. Rather, the Legislature increased criminal penalties in 1982 and, more significantly, the corrections department and the parole board have opted to throw vastly more probation violators back in prison.
In other words, New Hampshire has over the last quarter century knowingly opted to keep criminals incarcerated longer and in conditions that are deliberately dehumanizing. This springs to mind upon noticing the frieze of colored tiles above the entry portal of the general population living unit adjacent to the super-max, designed to evoke mountains. It is the only thing in sight that was deliberately installed for aesthetic reasons – the only possible chance for inmates, behind their tall concrete walls, to visualize how beautiful the world could be.
Unlike the Nazis, who planned to work Viktor Frankl to death, New Hampshire expects to release almost every inmate in the State Prison eventually. What is the cost to society, let alone the sanity of the individual inmates, if every moment of every day in prison is a deliberate immersion in boundless and unrelenting ugliness?
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“The best of us did not return,” Frankl confessed. “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who . . . had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends in order to save themselves.”
But, Frankl recalled, those who did manage to endure the unspeakable horrors “experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.” He described a fellow prisoner running into his barracks to implore his dead-tired comrades to run outside and gaze at the sunset through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods – “the same woods,” Frankl dryly notes, “in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant.”
“Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, with the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’”
How much could the immediate neighbors of this camp have known of any of this? Similarly, the ugliest building in New Hampshire is actually a complex of structures that, to judge from comments made on a recent tour for participants in the Leadership New Hampshire program, surprises visitors by its very existence. “Gee,” went one typical remark. “I never had any idea that all of this was back here.”
But 1,400 people live there, on North Main Street in Concord. At that address has stood, since 1880, the New Hampshire State Prison, now known as the New Hampshire State Prison for Men.
Nobody would equate those 1,400 inmates with Frankl and his fellow holocaust victims. The rule of law, not hatred and genocide, determines who is sent to the State Prison. Conditions there are humane. But if one accepts, as Frankl did, that one had to be immoral to survive in a concentration camp, then it follows that all inmates should be permitted the occasional glimpse of beauty despite their failings.
The State Prison has been designed expressly to make it very difficult for that to happen.
From the street, the State Prison retains a certain solemn beauty typical of 19th century lockups, from an era in which prisons were frequently labeled “penetentiaries” – places where the penitent could sit in solitude and contemplate their crime. The sharply hipped roof, the stolid brickwork, the big arched windows of a solemn, deliberately awe inspiring sort -- all of this testifies to a Victorian design sensibility calculated to make a statement about the majesty of the state.
Today those big windows have been largely bricked in, the glass openings reduced to slits. It’s a good metaphor for what’s inside – all the result of a bonanza of prison construction in the 80s and 90s. According to the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, driving that bonanza was a staggering 600 percent increase in New Hampshire’s prison population since 1981, while New Hampshire’s overall population grew by only 35.5 percent.
What were once the massive cell blocks behind those big windows is now space devoted to the prison infirmary, classrooms, offices and other support services. The living spaces themselves have been moved to the rear of a vastly expanded prison yard, so they are invisible to those outside the walls.
At the north end of the yard is the Hancock Building, a housing unit that resembles, and is, a hastily constructed warehouse. The rest of the living units are fan-shaped and jammed together in a zig-zag pattern that is only apparent from above.
The windowless “chow house,” where food is served to those inmates allowed to leave their cells to eat, is at the heart of this agglomeration. Dominating it visually, as one approaches it from the yard, is a huge series of wide outdoor ramps designed to provide accessibility to the eating facility.
Architecture always communicates. The message here seems to be that, where once we built prisons to evoke penitence and remorse in the face of stern justice, now all we care about is getting prisoners in and out without being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A few feet away are inmates who lack the privilege to use this ramp because they are so violent they have earned a spot in the super-max unit. The architectural aphorism “form follows function” does not apply here, given that these inmates remain in locked in their cells 23 hours a day, unless the purpose truly is the kind of sensory deprivation that leads to madness. The corridors are gloomy, designed so that the door of each cell overlooks nothing.
Cell windows are likewise tiny and open to small, barren, concrete-walled courtyards formed by the hub-and-spoke arrangement of this bunker-like structure. Inmates spend that precious one-hour of outside time either in such a lifeless outdoor zone or in similarly claustrophobic and featureless dayrooms.
The New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies has identified two reasons for the explosion in New Hampshire’s prison population. “What is not driving the growth in the state prison population is any apparent growth in serious crimes in New Hampshire,” according to a 2004 report. Rather, the Legislature increased criminal penalties in 1982 and, more significantly, the corrections department and the parole board have opted to throw vastly more probation violators back in prison.
In other words, New Hampshire has over the last quarter century knowingly opted to keep criminals incarcerated longer and in conditions that are deliberately dehumanizing. This springs to mind upon noticing the frieze of colored tiles above the entry portal of the general population living unit adjacent to the super-max, designed to evoke mountains. It is the only thing in sight that was deliberately installed for aesthetic reasons – the only possible chance for inmates, behind their tall concrete walls, to visualize how beautiful the world could be.
Unlike the Nazis, who planned to work Viktor Frankl to death, New Hampshire expects to release almost every inmate in the State Prison eventually. What is the cost to society, let alone the sanity of the individual inmates, if every moment of every day in prison is a deliberate immersion in boundless and unrelenting ugliness?
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