E18 The Cleaner, Greener, Smarter Jail of the Future
In this interview, Ken Ricci makes the case for why we need humane detention facilities, the design principles critical to creating spaces for the justice system, and the concept of the three-door jail. Ken also discusses the balance between designing for safety and security versus ethical and humane conditions, the importance of understanding mental health when designing justice system facilities, and key elements to designing courtrooms for best possible outcomes.
Ken’s extensive experience has led him to work on justice architecture around the country including courthouses, jails, correctional facilities, and government buildings. Ken is the founding Principal of CGL RicciGreene, and currently serves as the Executive Vice President.
Ken Ricci:
Studies have shown that sunlight speeds healing in hospitals, improves test scores in schools. There's a famous study in California, it improves production in a factory and sales in retail. And now studies have shown that even in an enclosed room, if you have a mural of nature, a stream, a pond, mountains, trees, the blood pressure of the individuals in the room goes down. It's just something that's built into our human nature. We enjoy seeing these… There's a fancy name for it, it's called biophilic. We are biophilic beings. We love to see life, seashore, the sunset, mountains. That's another ingredient in this environmental understanding that we now have.
Don MacPherson:
Innocent until proven guilty. It's a key tenet in American justice. If that tenant was practiced, however, we would ensure that people detained as they await their trials would be treated well. For decades, we have failed our citizens in this area. Our guest today is Ken Ricci. For nearly half a century, Ken has introduced innovative design principles in jails and courtrooms to ensure the people who occupy them have a sense of dignity and are treated humanely.
Ken, welcome to 12 Geniuses. Let's start out by talking about what you do.
Ken Ricci:
Well, I'm an architect and I specialize in the planning and design of justice facilities. Justice facilities include juvenile detention, courthouses, and adult jails.
Don MacPherson:
And why did you choose to get involved in this work?
Ken Ricci:
I went to Pratt Institute School of Architecture in the ‘60s. In the ‘60s, we believed that architecture should have a social dimension, and I did my thesis on a design of a youth detention center on Rikers Island. I interviewed the city architect. I took the ferry to Rikers Island. It was a real project that was on the city books. And I designed that project. In the process of doing that, I met a man named Donald Goff. Donald was the head of something called a Correctional Association of New York, which is a eleemosynary association founded in 1845 to assist the families of men in prison.
And Donald became my mentor. He guided me through the philosophy and knowledge of corrections. He worked in the New Jersey Correctional System under Lloyd McCorkle and Al Elias, who were pioneers in the field in the late ‘40s. when I graduated, I worked as a draftsman for a year. I hated it. I hated being at a desk. I wanted to be out in the wide world. And I hated taking orders. So, I joined the Peace Corps. When I got out, I started my own practice, and my first client was my mentor, Donald Goff. And we went from there. I was 27 years old, and I was an entrepreneur.
Don MacPherson:
Ken, can you talk about your upbringing and how that has influenced your career choice and the way you approach your work?
Well, when I was 10 years old, my father was laid off from his job, and he was devastated. He was depressed for about a year, and he found a job as a, what we used to call blue-collar worker, and he stayed there for the next 20 years. Even as a 10-year-old, I said to myself, I never want to get into a position where somebody's going to fire me. That's why I started on my own when I was 27. Also, at the time, all of my friends from architecture school wanted to get a job with this architect, that architect, and so forth, and I thought, “I don't want to be a slave in some genius's office. I want to do what I want to do.” So, that was my impetus. What did I learn growing up? Learn the value of sunlight. Again, when I was 10 years old, we were evicted from our apartment, and I went house hunting in the Bronx with my mother.
In those days, there were a lot of empty lots. Builders were building row houses like crazy. We would travel here and there and so forth, and she would say, “See, the kitchen must face east this way. This sunlight comes in, in the morning, and you feel good about that.” And she learned about that from my grandfather, her father, who had a macaroni store in the South Bronx at the time, or in the early days. And he would say,” Locate your store on the sunny side of the street. It makes people happy when they come in.” So, sunlight has been a theme in my practice of design of correctional facilities. Most people think of jails as dirty, dark, dingy, noisy, smelly places. And so, I had the desire to improve that, and that's my work, has been aimed at that goal ever since.
Don MacPherson:
What influence does an Italian-American upbringing have on you and your work?
Ken Ricci:
Well, our neighborhood in Pelham Bay in the Bronx was mostly Italian. So, there was a great feeling of respect that one had. One understood that there was a larger world out there. And I try to translate that into my architecture work. That's one of the secrets of the success of so-called colonial architecture, is that most of the buildings are what we would call background buildings. They recognize the context and they fit into the context.
Don MacPherson:
What changes have you seen architecturally in the, or from an architectural approach, to the way we design jails?
Ken Ricci:
Well, I've been fortunate to have a front-row seat in the changes. And the changes have been monumental, especially in the attitude of county commissioners and sheriffs. What we recognize nowadays, and it's widespread, is that people in jail, by and large, don't even belong there. We start to recognize now that jails, the way we think about jails are obsolete. The population in jails right now is 30% to 40% mentally or behavioral issues driven. We closed the mental hospitals in the ‘70s. We thought we were doing a great thing. Lo and behold, where do these people wind up? In jail. We depopulate the jails, and lo and behold, the homeless population goes up. This is why we came up with the idea of the three-door jail.
Don MacPherson:
And what is the three-door jail?
Ken Ricci:
The three-door jails is a new idea. It's based on an idea by one of my clients, Rob Green, who's now the Secretary of Corrections in Maryland. In our discussions, we come up with this idea for a new facility, which is that when you are detained by the police, they bring you for intake, and you have the choice of going through three doors. One would be to detention, as we know it, right? You go into a cell and you're detained until trial. The second door would be a diversion into justice support system. And you would have magistrates in this building that would interview the person and let them out on bail, let them out on release on recognizance to a third party, and so forth. And then the third door would be deflection into the mental health system. So, if it was recognized that the person was having some sort of a break or some sort of schizophrenic event, the person would be deflected into a comfortable area, couches, chairs, and so forth, for no greater than 23 hours. Meanwhile, you would work the phones and try to find there where they live next of kin, some support group or community home. Chances are these people have forgotten to take their meds and got into some trouble on the street with the police and so on.
So, it's the three-door jail, detention, diversion, or deflection. It's a way of dealing with recognizing the diversity of the population flowing through, at this point in time, the justice system. Since I got into this practice in, like I said, in 1969, my first convention, that jail design is much more humanitarian now. It's much more, I would say, needs focused rather than risk focused. That is to say we look at the person holistically. They have medical needs, they're diabetic, they're this, they're that. They have, let’s say somatic needs and psychic needs. They have behavioral issues. So, there's a recognition of needs versus risk. As a result, this idea of the direct supervision has taken root. The officer is embedded in the housing unit with the detainees, and the officer interacts with the individuals. The individuals get up in the morning, they do their meds, they make their appointments to court, they have their meals.
They get a little recreation. Sunlight is coming into the day room. And everything is calm and quiet. And the officer is under control. The inmates feel safe because they feel someone is in control. And there have been studies to prove that. And the officer feels safe because she's been trained in a lot of rigorous training in terms of, not only security, and procedures, and laws and so forth, but just the interactions.
Don MacPherson:
Could you talk a little bit about how environment influences behavior in a jail?
Ken Ricci:
Yes. Environment cues behavior. If you put someone in a cage, they'll act like an animal and you will perceive them as an animal. If we have more, what I'm going to call normative environment, where you’re treated as a human being, the studies have shown you get better behavior. Now, given human nature, we also help improve behavior by having cameras and video cameras in the facilities, and it improves the behavior of the inmates as well as the correctional officers because they know they're being taped. And those tapes, digital record is maintained for a long time, years, in fact. And so, it's cut down on violence. We've seen this in our, time after time, in our facilities. The ingredients of this environmental upgrades would be sunlight, sunlight hitting the floor; would be noise control with acoustic treatment; would be bright colors, not garish colors, but bright colors; softer materials. So, we use fabric chairs, but they're weighted chairs. They have sandbags embedded in them, so you can't pick them up and throw them.
And, of course, good sightlines. So, the officer knows at all times where everyone is. There are no blind corners, there are no long corridors. The officer is in control. That is the key ingredient of this direct supervision. Oh, I'm sorry. The other part of the environment is also maintaining a 72-degree temperature, year in and year out. And being in that environment cues a much higher level of behavior. There's less aggression, there's less tension, there's less adrenaline. That's basically what it is. Studies have shown that sunlight speeds healing in hospitals, improves test scores in schools. There's a famous study in California, it improves production in a factory and sales in retail. And now studies have shown that even in an enclosed room, if you have a mural of nature, a stream, a pond, mountains, trees, the blood pressure of the individuals in the room goes down. It's just something that's built into our human nature. We enjoy seeing these… There's a fancy name for it, it's called biophilic. The so-called green design for office space puts the private offices in board with class fronts and puts the worker bees, shall we say, in cubicles or workstations, outboard adjacent to the window wall of the building.
Don MacPherson:
I want to ask about Rikers because I think a lot of people will at least have heard of Rikers Island. Could you describe what the conditions were like when it was 22,000 people? And then, maybe we can go to what these borough jails would be like in contrast to what it was like at its peak.
Ken Ricci:
It's an island, and there were many, many buildings on this island, some going back to the 1920s. Over a period of time, variety of buildings were built until the early ‘80s when there was tremendous growth in incarceration, and they didn't even build buildings. They erected tents, basically. They were fabric buildings in like an airplane hangar, and there were rows and rows and rows of inmates sleeping on cots. But the facilities themselves, the buildings were of a vintage from the, I'm going to say from the 1940s, telephone plan, we would call it. So, imagine a long corridor, and off of that corridor, were other corridors. And each of those corridors had two rows of cells, one above the other. Now, these long corridors, when the population grew, they added onto the corridors. So the corridors were, no exaggeration, thousands of feet long. So, the impression that you had going through the buildings was an anthill, where you were just an insignificant little ant in this giant anthill.
And it was noisy, it was dirty, it was dark, and it was dangerous. But the real problem at Rikers was twofold: number one, the overcrowding; and number two, just the island location. If you think about it, an island, or the root word, insula is isolated. And that's what they were. So, there was a dehumanizing element to the entire place.
Don MacPherson:
With that in mind, if the behaviors of the people who are locked up are going to turn to be animalistic, then aren't the behaviors of the people who are in charge of keeping them under control going to change as well?
Ken Ricci:
Yes. That's the perception. In fact, one of the architects for the Department of Corrections, as we were designing one of the facilities recently, a replacement facility in Brooklyn, said, “You have to remember we have different categories: we have lions, we have tigers, and we have wolves.” What? That's the way you think of your clientele. That's the mentality and it went unquestioned. To be fair, the Rikers Island was swept under the carpet, was ignored by all of the elected officials for years and years and years. There was no political benefit to spending money there. The administrations only did it because of the court orders and the overcrowding.
Don MacPherson:
So, why are people doing it now?
Ken Ricci:
Good question. The reason for the current movement now is having to do with the deaths on Rikers Island as a result of poor conditions, overheated conditions, people who are on medication dying because their cell lacked air conditioning. And there’s a lot of brutality. And it came to people's attention about 10 years ago, eight years ago. Right now, there is a broad consensus that Rikers Island needs to be closed. That consensus is certainly by the current administration, but also by the academia, business community, the foundations, the not-for-profits, the advocates. It's widespread. It's across the board. So, I don't think it's going to go back to where it was. I think this will happen. What form it will take remains to be seen. Right now it’s four jails and four boroughs.
Don MacPherson:
Today's guest is Ken Ricci. When we come back from this short break, Ken will talk about what the correctional facility of the future will look like.
Hi everybody. This is your podcast host, Don McPherson. At 12 Geniuses, we write, report, and speak about the trends shaping the way we live and work. As we look toward entering a new decade, technologies like 3D printing, artificial intelligence, gene editing, and more and more sophisticated robots will continue to disrupt and change our society. If these trends are important to you, we invite you to follow us on social media. And to book me to speak at your next event, contact us at future@12geniuses.com.
We are back with Ken Ricci. In this segment, we will discuss how women's correctional facilities are being designed with motherhood in mind, why courtroom design is critical to fair trial outcomes, and what the ideal size of a correctional facility is.
How do you balance between safety, and security, and creating an environment that's ethical, humane, and stabilizing?
Ken Ricci:
Right. That's the architect's challenge; balancing between an environment that's ethical and humane and safety and security. So, you start with safety and security. You start by, and this is where we have built a reputation as planners also, of doing a analysis of your population to establish the various levels of risk and need. And so, we, by and large, can show that in the jail setting, that 60 to 70% of the population can live in a direct supervision environment. There is a percentage, 10%, 15% who are predatory. So, we've done this analysis, and at first, sheriffs were skeptical. They said, “None of my people will work in these facilities.” But the correctional officers love it because it's air-conditioned and it's safe, and so forth.
This direct supervision idea that we've discussed earlier, this idea of environment cues behavior is something that we've been able to convince our clients is actually a benefit. And buying these new ideas does not cost more, will be safer for inmate and for officer, and will have better outcomes actually.
Don MacPherson:
So, it does not cost more. The design that you're talking about will not cost taxpayers more money.
Ken Ricci:
No.
Don MacPherson:
Could it be argued that it actually saves money if there are fewer lawsuits or?
Ken Ricci:
That's a good way to look at it. Government doesn't work that way.
Don MacPherson:
I understand that, but society does, right? And we should think about it in that way.
Ken Ricci:
No. The correctional administrators certainly value that. They want a safe facility. The clients, when I talk about the clients, call them county commissioners, don't really know what's going on in jail. We go through a rigorous planning before we start designing. So, we call it project definition. And it opens a lot of eyes.
Don MacPherson:
Do you see a distinction in the way you design between male facilities and female facilities?
Ken Ricci:
Yes.
Don MacPherson:
And what would those distinctions be?
Ken Ricci:
Well, first of all, there are a lot fewer females in these facilities than males. I would say it's maybe 10%. If you have 10% of the population, there still are various categories of risk and need that have to be accommodated. I think, by and large, women are more gregarious. We have to also remember that most women, and many of the men, have had traumatic histories starting at a young age, whether it's sexual or physical or psychological trauma. We have to bear that in mind. It's called trauma informed design. And so, you try to create an environment that improves sociability.
We actually have now in units, we'll have a nursery so that if a woman comes in who's pregnant, they will give birth and they can stay with their child for a period of time; three months, four months, six months, eight months. So, where you have large groups of women, that's feasible. When you have smaller groups, it becomes more of a design challenge, but you can do it. And women socialize differently than men, so you have to take that into account in terms of dormitories group cells where you have four beds in a room, or eight beds in a room. So, there's a lot of discussion about that. There are other people that are much more expert than I am, and that's why we have a staff of 40 people in the firm.
Don MacPherson:
Is the identification of somebody who's gone through trauma or has experienced traumatic events, is that done during the three-door process?
Ken Ricci:
Yeah, intake usually takes place over a period of days. It's not just a two-hour thing. So, it's over a period of days. A solid intake process would take that long, and some of that would emerge so that whatever altercation the person got involved in could be put into perspective.
Don MacPherson:
I want to make sure that I understood this correctly. Do the babies live on site or?
Ken Ricci:
Yes.
Don MacPherson:
They do?
Ken Ricci:
Yes.
Don MacPherson:
That's incredible. So, what sort of frequency are the mothers able to see…
Ken Ricci:
Oh, they live with them.
Don (21:48):
They live together. They're integrated.
Ken Ricci:
Yeah. So, it'll be like… In fact, on Rikers, there's a nursery that's actually not bad. There's, sort of a central room, and then there are rooms where the mothers and the child sleep, and then there's a central room where there's activities during the day. The mothers have to do certain things, go to court or see their lawyer, whatever. So, there's the equivalent of daycare.
Don MacPherson:
Okay. And these babies would be living there for months at a time potentially?
Ken Ricci:
Yeah.
Don MacPherson:
Okay. What does that do to their development?
Ken Ricci:
Well, I'm not a psychologist or anything, but I think it’s just common sense that a newborn wants to be with his or her mother, and even more than a newborn. So, that's a very critical time and development. So, it's a very touchy situation.
Don MacPherson:
It's a very difficult choice, because, on the one hand, you're putting them in this facility that may not be the ideal environment for them. The other hand, you would be pulling them away from a mother.
Ken Ricci:
Exactly. But I would say the ideal environment is to be close to your mother. Everything else is considered.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, all things considered. Yeah. You're right.
Ken Ricci:
Yeah, all things considered. Yeah, but again, there's bright colors, there's toys, there's different areas.
Don MacPherson:
If it's designed correctly.
Ken Ricci:
If it's designed correctly. But there's, yeah.
Don MacPherson:
Can you talk about some of the things that are important when designing a court and some of the things that are innovative in that space?
Ken Ricci:
So, there is a lot of development there. A lot of people that go to court appear pro se, which is to say they represent themselves, whether it's divorce or family court. And family court is the large growth area. An amazing statistic is that regardless of the level of the court system, only 3% to 4% of all cases go to trial.
Don MacPherson:
That's incredible.
Ken Ricci:
So, the diet of courtroom dramas that we have on TV, and when you watch the TV, they compress the timeframe. There's an event, there's an arrest, they go to court, dah, dah, dah. That takes years in some instances. But only three to 4% of cases go to trial, partially because of the sluggish nature of the system, and people game the system. So, what to do about that? So, the new idea for court houses, in my estimation, is that the courtroom should be the last place that you go rather than the first place. And there are a lot of systems that are embracing this idea. In other words, if you go to court, the first thing you do is to talk to a hearing officer, “What's the issue here?” And so forth. “Can we mediate? Can we arbitrate?” Then you go before another hearing officers. In other words, to get people to settle their differences. If that doesn't work, then you see a judge. In fact, in Columbus, Ohio, Franklin County, Judge Frye there said, “I want my chambers to be an active area. I want to have the various parties be able to sit here in conference rooms.”
“So, I don't see my chambers as a refuge from the hustle and bustle tumble of the courthouse. I see it as a place where I'm managing my caseload.” They had caseload, would typically be 15,000 cases per year, per judge. Do the math.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I'm trying, that's about 50 a day or more.
Ken Ricci:
Yeah. Of course, they try to mitigate that by having magistrates because judges are assigned by the legislature. Just can't go out and hire another judge. But Judge Frye said, “I want my chambers to have my office, my secretary, then I want three conference areas. I want a Xerox machine, I want a coffee pot, I want some couches, some sofas. I bring the parties in here. They come to court, before they come in, I'll bring them in here. Go in that room and settle. If you can't settle then we'll set a date. And I go in and I work with them a little bit.” He said, “That's how I handle my caseload.” So, it's a new idea.
Don MacPherson:
What does the lack of sunlight or even windows or anything, or any visuals in a courtroom, other than wood and benches due to the ability to, number one, stay present? Because I think that the judge, and certainly the defendant wants the jury to be present in listening to the facts. It doesn't seem like an optimal environment for a really important decision-making…
Ken Ricci:
You're right. The most beautiful courtroom I've seen was designed probably in the 1890s, or so forth, in Hartford, Connecticut. Of course, there's high ceilings, but there was a band of windows around one side of the courtroom, the long side of the courtroom under which the jury sat. And also, the criminal court at a 100 Centre St, in New York City has a similar setup where there's a band of windows in each courtroom, and the courtrooms have to be arranged and planned so that they're sort of bookended, so that they have a free, what we call a free surface on the exterior. So, it's expensive to design a courtroom with windows because it takes up more area. But we attempt to get light into our courtrooms, any which way we can. Sometimes we bring it in over the judge's bench, sometimes we bring it in over the front door.
So yes, we agree with you. You should be at least able to see the sky, to see the quality of sunlight change over the course of the day, so you know what time it is. And you bring up an interesting topic also in terms of the jury. And the chief judge of New York State, years ago, Justice Kaye, had the jury project where she insisted that all of those state courtrooms, courthouses, upgrade the jury experience. Technology, which you referenced earlier, is a big factor in courthouse design. For example, traffic court, no need to appear to pay your ticket. You can have a kiosk. And in Columbia, South Carolina, we designed a courtroom, courthouse just like that. It's an old shopping center. So, you pull up in front, you walk in, there's a big lobby, you look at the monitor, where's your case? And there are kiosks. You can go there and pay your fine if you don't want to challenge it.
And you walk down a long corridor and go into a courtroom. There's that kind of technology. There's also one jury assignment. One of the big complaints about jury assignment is you go there, you sit there all day, you don't get selected, come back the next day. It's a big waste of time. Some jurisdictions have one juror, one day. You go there, if you don't get selected, you go home.
Don MacPherson:
This is probably more of a question around prisons, but it may have some application around jails as well. What's the ideal size of a facility? And when does it get to be… What's the breakpoint?
Ken Ricci:
The thinking used to be that 500 beds was, or you could call it the optimal number because you had economies of scale, whereas 200, 300, you didn't. But as one administrator said, “I want it to be not so big that I don't know everybody's name.” Now, that's old school to walk around and know everybody's name.
Don MacPherson:
If you were to look out 10 years, how would you see the ideal correctional facility looking?
Ken Ricci:
Oh, you could read my article in the American Jail Magazine.
Don MacPherson:
Plug yourself. Yeah.
Ken Ricci:
Yeah. American Jail Magazine. Jail of the Future.
Don MacPherson:
Okay. What does the jail of the future look like?
Ken Ricci:
The jail of the future is smaller, smarter, greener, and kinder. The jail, as we know it is, as I said, is obsolete. So, it's smaller because we have more mechanisms for filtering and for diverting and deflecting into the mental health system. It's smarter because it uses technology, whether it's video visitation or that kind of thing. It's greener. So, we want it to be… We might have some gardens where we might recycle a brown water and use it for horticultural. And it's kinder. That is to say it's designed with more humane features in mind; sunlight, air conditioning, acoustics, good sightlines.
Don MacPherson:
What kind of pushback do you have from, whether it's citizens or politicians who say, “These guys, women are criminals, we can't treat them humanely?”
Ken Ricci:
Years ago, we would see that. I mentioned earlier, air conditioning for these guys, it's too good for them. But I have to say that over the years, I think attitudes have evolved. I think there's a recognition that the closure of the mental health system has resulted in diverting this population into the jail system. And they don't belong there. Yes, they resisted arrest. Okay, so they were off their meds. When you really scratch the surface, most of us know somebody who's been in jail, and you wouldn't want them to be treated… Want them to be treated in the right way. So, now with jails, there is a body of law that protects the rights of a person who's not been convicted in terms of access to medical care, environment, and hygiene, and nutrition. And there are a widespread voluntary standards; National Sheriff's Association, American Correctional Association, American Jail Association.
And there's a professionalism now in the correctional field that is quite high, actually. So, there's a recognition that the jail is just a repository for a lot of people that can't make it otherwise. And when we think we've solved one problem, mental health, the population shows up in the jails.
Don MacPherson:
Not right.
Ken Ricci:
It's not right.
Don MacPherson:
There was something that you said very early on that really struck a chord with me, and that's around human potential. With people who are in these facilities for months and months, how can we not hit the pause button on their human potential? How are we designing our jails in order to enable them to reach their human potential?
Ken Ricci:
In the jail setting, one of the key tenets also of, we call it the social dimension, is to allow certain amount of territorial control for the individual.
There are some people who argue that they'd rather be in a cell than be in a dorm, because they can control their stuff, and they can modify their environment, so to speak. But developing human potential, and I know, again, I think, as the emphasis has shifted from risk, is this person medium, minimum, or maximum? The emphasis has shifted to need. What does this person need? How can we help them while they're here in a short period of time? For example, there's a program called R.E.S.T.A.R.T for people who are about to enter the free world, and they spend six hours a day in programming. And so, treatment is not just with an eyedropper. It's a series, a continual series of classes and exposure to activities for daily living. For example, you and I take for granted, the alarm clock goes off, we get up, we clean up, and we show up. A lot of people have not been brought up that way. And so, just that alone is part of developing human potential.
Don MacPherson:
In terms of just how to do that?
Ken Ricci:
How to do that.
Don MacPherson:
The life skills.
Ken Ricci:
How to do that, yeah. You have to get out of bed. You have to show up. You have to clean up and you have to show up. So, there's that rudimentary kind of thing. Learning the, I think you called it earlier, emotional intelligence. A lot of the lessons that help us to succeed in the world are learned around the dining room table or the kitchen table. So, it's one thing to get a GED, but it's another thing to learn how to be responsible; if you're in, do what you're supposed to do and show up when you're supposed to show up.
Don MacPherson:
Or could you just name a handful of projects that you've worked on and some of the achievements that you're most proud of?
Ken Ricci:
Well, there's the Union County Juvenile Detention Facility, which received a World Architecture News, World Effectiveness Award. We were one of two. We're pretty proud of that. There was a global competition, and we demonstrated that our response to the program was this, the building and the environments that we created. Yeah, very proud of that. I'm proud of all the buildings that we're doing because I think they have a social dimension, a humane dimension. That's what we're noted for. The Denver jail, the jail in Denver, Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center, proud of that because it's… Modern jails make good neighbors. And this building proved that. We were, along with another firm, they designed the courthouse.
We actually worked on the courthouse as well, and we designed the jail with a local firm. And this is a centerpiece of downtown Denver, the civic zone. You have the State House, then you have the city hall, and you have the Federal Mint, and then you have our buildings and a central civic plaza. So, it was a building that was a civic building, it created a civic space, and it's a terrific jail in terms of the way it's organized. So I'm very proud of that.
Don MacPherson:
How does it feel to design a building that's going to potentially outlast you?
Ken Ricci:
Eh, it feels good, right? We're supposed to do that.
Don MacPherson:
Well, Ken, I've really enjoyed the conversation. I really appreciate all the time that you've given. And Ken, thank you for being a genius. From your lips to God's ears. You'd be surprised how many people say that.
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