homo naturaliter est animal sociale

The United States has the world´s highest documented incarceration rate.
In 2007 over 7.2 million adults, or about 2.4% of the U.S. adult population were on probation or parole, in jail or prison, 2.3 million of those actually incarcerated.
Since 1979 the US incarceration rate has quadrupled- but not its prison space, resulting in overcrowding.
Out of a political conviction that rehabilitation were a futile pursuit, countless work and education programs have been axed.
In the light of the widespread use of long-term isolation of individual inmates as an attempt to quell violence resulting from the combination of those factors, a recent article in the New Yorker aims to answer the rethorical question:

Is solitary confinement torture?


adpsr architects/designers/planners for social responsibility describes the current US prison system as a moral blight and the disciplinary model of the prison a failure.
The group´s Prison Alternative Initiative appeals to pledge not to participate in the design, construction, or renovation of prisons and instead to develop productive alternatives to incarceration.

seizure

image: Seizure by Roger Hiorns was open July 23rd to Oct 18th 2008 at 151-189 Harper Road, London SE1.
In autumn 2008 a large scale chemical experiment took over a ground floor flat in London´s Elephant and Castle.
Effectively infesting the concrete structure with an organically grown bedazzlement, artist Roger Hiorns sealed off the walls of a bedsit in the housing block scheduled for demolition, then poured 90,000 litres of hot supersaturated copper sulphate solution through holes in ceiling from the flat above covered the walls of a bedsit in a housing block facing demolition. When the liquid was drained weeks later, all exposed surface area of the flat was revealed to be taken over by chrystal growths in a vibrant electric blue.

Link to photographs of the installation and the process involved at ICON magazine.
video of the installation