Pre-Release School (rehabilitation center for offenders)

Effat University

Project idea

After serving their time, numerous former inmates return to society with anger and frustration. To some extent, people themselves have culpability because of stereotypes about ex-convicts that result in difficulties in finding housing, employment, and education.

Project’s Goals
The plan’s goal is self- realization which leads towards TRANSFORMATION, transformation through LEARNING and REINTEGRATION. The prison complex is no longer a punitive complex, but a gateway to reintegration to the outside world. The idea of prisoners living and learning catalyzes procedures of self-improvement through the built environment. The Project’s Goals is to these inmates must likewise feel that they have a chance- that they can go back to the community one day and become new people, and not be branded as ex-cons who cannot change. Reducing reoffending and recidivism for the benefit of society and inmates are important to project goals.

Project’s Objectives
The objectives of remedying reoffending incorporate discipline, rehabilitation, deterrence of crime, discouragement of wrongdoing, preventing recidivism or relapse of criminal behavior as well as reducing delinquency and violence in the community. Objectives similarly include the supervision of lawbreakers and preparing offenders for re-entry into society.
This will be achieved by creating a facility that:
1- serves to reintegrate the inmates into society through learning, counseling, vocational training, and work, as well as supporting offenders to resettle in their communities through enhanced employability and finding livelihood/employment opportunities;
2-aims to create balanced individuals through recreational, spiritual and educational activities;
3- forming inner communities, fostering each inmate’s internal will for personal development.

Project description

The project focuses on a rehabilitation center for offenders where their environment emphasizes their development through humanizing spaces. Humanisation refers to generating areas where positive life processes are available, such as more interactions with community members and more learning opportunities (Stott, 2014). Offenders in these spaces can have the opportunity to change the way they see the world because they are taught new modes of thinking and living. They also feel they are treated as human beings, thereby learning how to treat others with dignity and respect too. In addition, the center intends to analyze the prison mode and explore the paradoxical relationships between freedom, control, punishment rehabilitation, normalization, and security. Studies on how to improve individual thoughts about criminal life and reintegration are fundamental to creating prison spaces that change, not further damage, prisoners.

Technical information

This complex building is located on a highland area, so it divided into four floors with different levels of entrances around the building.
The building has a system of a program for the intimate from healing, rehabilitation, tell integration with the community through school.
The Lower Ground Floor is the first journey of the inmate where administration, preparing of the inmates and showing them the program of the system, also there is a separate entrance for the visitors where inmates can meet there family, friends, lawyers, and police officers, not only that but part of the idea after self-healing we have to integrate them with there family before the community and to achieve that there is conjugal area with separate room that the family can stay with the intimate on private within the building and without getting him out yet, to have a program of how to be a good person with there family. The prison complex is no longer a punitive complex, but a gateway to reintegration to the outside world.

The idea of prisoners living and learning catalyzes procedures of self-improvement through the built environment. Making the overarching architectural themes of the ground and wall combine with elements of nature and community clusters encourages a domestic scale of living, generating a place where people relationships, in light of brotherhood and sisterhood, may possibly shape positive inner changes. One of the key contemplations has been to coordinate parts in order to communicate a whole (through visual and spatial connections) and discover approaches to leave more land free for development and mutual spaces. As penitentiaries involve significant land and public money in societies, it is essential to consider this idea further.