Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) has unveiled a set of schematic proposals aimed at re-imagining Atlanta’s city jail as a Center for Equity.

The plans follow extensive community consultation and design development workshops focused on finding a new use for a 471,000-square-foot jail facility that has been rendered obsolete due to a wave of criminal and law enforcement reforms enacted by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

In an update announcing the latest phase of the project posted to the group's Medium, the DJDS explains that "it is important to recognize that despite the end of slavery 'in theory,' the oppression of black communities continued and transformed into new laws and policies forming a new system of enslavement through mass incarceration."

Citing author Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, DJDS writes, "we build on Alexander’s work and find that the current lack of imagination to envision a different justice system, one that treats all people equally, is holding us all back from becoming a liberated society."

"But there is a bright light in Atlanta," DJDS explains, "after more than six years of organizing led by formerly incarcerated activist Marylynn Winn of Women on the Rise (WOR) and Xochitl Brevera of the Racial Justice Action Center (RJAC), the City of Atlanta committed to close the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC)." 

This closure as well as the reforms instituted by Mayor Bottoms, which include the elimination of municipal cash bail, the decriminalization of low-level offenses, and the termination of a long-term contract with ICE, represent the first steps toward a broader effort to refocus municipal energies away from incarceration and toward social justice. 

A recently published Task Force report developed by the multifaceted group tasked with studying just how to re-purpose the jail explains that the next step in this transformation is to "establish a dynamic and vibrant Center for Equity that will advance racial and economic equity, promote restorative justice, and invest in the well-being of individuals, families, and communities."

And so, DJDS, after collaborating with community members to shape the ultimate functions and goals of the redevelopment, created four schemes that seek a path forward for the building and its surrounding. 

The first is a more modest approach that would re-purpose the lower two floors of the structure as an "Equity Podium" housing the Center for Equity and other community functions. In this scheme, the upper levels of the former jail would be demolished while the lower levels are repurposed.

A larger scheme aims to re-purpose the entire jail tower with an expanded set of programs that include residential uses and more generous offerings from the Center for Equity. The concrete tower, under this scheme, would be re-clad with wood finishes, projecting canopies, and new windows. At its base, the structure would be anchored by a  "trauma-informed Super Lobby" that creates a new community room for the neighborhood.

A third scheme would demolish the existing building entirely and replace it with a campus configuration of community programs, housing, and other facilities. 

The final scheme would turn the site into a park or memorial while deploying the Center for Equity as a dispersed network of small-scale neighborhood community centers.

Next, the City of Atlanta will take time to formally review the project proposals, after which the project is expected to move forward in one of the four proposed schemes. 

Describing the future of the project, DJDS writes finally, "While the current situation in Atlanta is complicated and changes by the week, this process is a prototype for unbuilding racism and ending mass incarceration and is the first city wide process and re-imagining of its kind."