Chicago Reader22%
An oasis inside the Cook County jail? 14%
By Shawn Mulcahy13%
7/29/2026, 5:00:00 AM
Keywords: Surveillance2026, Vol 55 No 19
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 22.9% saturation with 878 hits. Analysis detected 4,152 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,834 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 29.3% and a BS Rank of 14% (19,430 of 22,361 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.90% of the article peer group.
In mid-February, a team from DLR Group, an international architectural firm, met with a coterie of local government officials to unveil plans for an open, airy 22,000-square-foot building it had been contracted to design in southwest Chicago.
While Oasis established the idea of relief and restoration,” the presentation read, “Groves evolved that concept into one of belonging—transforming a momentary refuge into a layered, living environment where people feel held, protected, and connected.”
While the building wouldn’t have real oases or groves, the team promised to bring those healing, soothing properties indoors.
But DLR wasn’t enlisted to design a hospital, a behavioral health center, or any other site you might typically consider restorative.
Rather, the studio had been hired by Cook County officials to design a $7.1 million “enhanced visitation center” at the notoriously dangerous—and sometimes deadly—county jail.
It is expected to include small and large meeting rooms, an open atrium that could be converted into a community event space, a spot for wraparound social services, a kids’ play area, and an outdoor patio.
Site preparation is already underway, and the county is planning to break ground later this fall.
Rendering of the visitation center’s exterior Credit: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
The enhanced visitation center is one of a handful of projects in the works at the 96-acre Cook County jail complex.
County budget records show officials have set aside at least $400 million for the design, construction, and maintenance of new and existing jail buildings through 2035.
That number could grow, although few details about potential renovations are publicly available.
The offices of both Cook County sheriff Tom Dart and board president Toni Preckwinkle refused to share a copy of a master plan for the jail campus that has been in progress for nearly a decade, invoking an exemption in state law that shields preliminary drafts from public view.
(The Reader has appealed that determination to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.)
The records the sheriff’s office did provide are heavily redacted, offering little information beyond basic design ideas and renderings of the visitation center’s lobby.
While county officials have largely kept mum about plans for the jail, the presentation on its visitation center, which the Reader obtained through a public records request, offers clues as to how the county may approach future projects.
In its pitch, DLR invoked the 11 principles of trauma-informed design, a framework published by the Trauma-Informed Design Society in 2024 to guide architects and designers in creating spaces that foster safety, resilience, and healing.
A slide from the team’s presentation titled “Oasis + Groves | Materiality” suggested ways the team would translate those principles into the final product: rubber floors with wood and polished concrete detailing; warm, neutral paint colors foregrounded by “calming accents” of greens, browns, and golds; and “biophilic shapes” paired with “de-escalation furniture” and “urban overlap.”
Rendering of the visitation center’s lobby Credit: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
Yet community organizers, advocates, and experts who spoke with the Reader argued that jails and prisons exist primarily to separate people from their communities and strip them of their autonomy and agency.
As they saw it, no such site could be trauma-informed when incarceration itself is inherently traumatic.
And while some recognized the intention behind improving conditions for visitors and incarcerated people, they argued that investment in the jail ultimately reflects the county’s long-term commitment to incarceration.
They called instead for increased funding for community-based services, like housing and food assistance, that address many of the reasons people are later criminalized.
“There’s no such thing as a trauma-informed cage,” said jasmine Sankofa, executive director of the national advocacy group Movement for Family Power.
“And while the [county] plans to spend millions to pretty up its visitation center, communities are left with very little investment.”
Cook County is projecting a $550 million budget shortfall in 2027, the largest in 16 years.
Preckwinkle said in June that the county board is considering “a variety of belt-tightening measures” to close the gap.
Organizing director Holly Krig of Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, a group that advocates for incarcerated caregivers and criminalized survivors of abuse, put it another way.
“There’s this adage: You can’t shine a turd.
But repeatedly, the people involved in making this decision have decided that that is not rhetorical and have responded with, ‘Yes, you can.’”
Overall, many of the advocates who spoke with the Reader said the visitation center would do little to improve the current living conditions of incarcerated people, who for years have sounded the alarm about brutality, neglect, and inedible food.
The Cook County jail’s population has continued to tick upward since State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke took office, despite fewer reported violent crimes in Chicago.
“The idea of creating a space where people could have greater contact with their loved ones is an idea that, I think, everyone in the advocacy community would support,” said Matt McLoughlin, an organizer with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice.
“But it seems like there are better ways [Sheriff Dart] could be allocating the resources available to him to meet the goals of this site without having to increase spending.”
A slide from DLR Group’s presentation explains the inspiration behind the Cook County jail’s new visitation center.
The Cook County jail’s former Division 1 began demolition in 2021.
The Cook County jail’s notorious Division 1 opened in 1929.
Its long, sterile hallways were lined with rows of steel bars and two-person cells roughly the size of a parking spot.
Once home to mobster Al Capone, before he was transferred to federal prison on tax evasion charges, and the state’s first electric chair, which the staff morbidly called “Old Sparky,” it also held the stage where blues legend B.B.
King performed his famous Live in Cook County Jail set.
But by 2021, as it neared its hundredth birthday, Division 1 had sat vacant and crumbling for nearly a decade.
Some five years earlier, Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Sheriff Tom Dart outlined a plan to raze the building, along with the smaller Divisions 3 and 17.
The demolition projects were part of a concerted effort to “reduce the jail population and right-size facilities,” declared a county press release in November 2016.
The same day, Preckwinkle stood in front of a partially destroyed wall, flanked by county officials in hard hats, as an excavator sat poised to continue work.
“We know that holding people in jail destroys lives,” she told reporters.
“Every effort needs to be made to be sure that the people keep working, attending school, and caring for their families as they await their trials.”
Around the same time, the county’s Bureau of Asset Management hired a team of architects and planners to create a ten-year master plan for the Cook County Department of Corrections (CCDOC).
Many of the buildings on the jail campus had suffered from years of deferred maintenance, and the work aligned with a countywide initiative to cut costs by closing or offloading real estate the government no longer needed.
The jail had more than 65 buildings totaling roughly 3.9 million square feet, and officials sought a plan that outlined “clear redevelopment . . . that supports the strategic direction of the Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Corrections while strengthening, modernizing and enhancing the functional efficiency” of the jail, according to county procurement records.
For the job, the county selected STV/Heery, a joint partnership between two multinational construction companies that was well-versed in the design of jails and prisons.
Planner David Ziskind, for example, had previously worked on projects for nearly 50 correctional and mental health facilities across Massachusetts.
Project manager R.
Price Jepsen counted among his accomplishments a $60 million master plan at the infamous Rikers Island jail complex in New York City.
And planner Fred Moyer, a former University of Illinois architecture professor, had at one point been tapped to work on a $2.5 billion project building prisons across Saudi Arabia, a country human rights organizations have long criticized for abuses and that has one of the highest execution rates in the world, according to Amnesty International.
A guard tower inside the Cook County jail’s Division 11
The team toured each of the jail’s buildings, interviewed staff and incarcerated people, and met repeatedly with key government stakeholders over the next two years to hone their vision for a reimagined CCDOC.
The resulting product “quantified the long-term capital and operating costs of renovations and additions to the existing DOC Campus, as compared with its replacement with new facilities,” Preckwinkle wrote in her annual 2020 budget recommendation.
“The next step in this historic, transformative process is the demolition of [Division 1],” she wrote, adding that community stakeholders would be involved in the development of a “new Adult Detention Center.”
This direction offered the county “the opportunity to re-orient the pre-trial detention function” toward “goals of access to family and counsel, full access for the disabled, greater efficacy of healthcare and mental health services and a dramatic reduction in operating costs.”
In community forums and email bulletins throughout 2021 and 2022, however, the county said the former Division 1 would ultimately be converted into a 5.5-acre outdoor recreational area.
Neither the Adult Detention Center nor the recreation area appears to have panned out yet.
The $400 million or more that the county has forecast spending on jail campus design, construction, and renovations through 2035 includes the $7.1 million visitation center, $123.5 million for accessibility upgrades across the CCDOC, an $18.6 million renovation of the current Cermak hospital, and at least $2.6 million for a new healthcare facility.
Another line item, simply titled “DOC Replacement Facility,” does not include a budgeted amount.
In 2025, the county released a request for supplier qualifications—a process used to short-list contractors before soliciting bids for a final agreement—that sought design and engineering services for the new healthcare facility.
And in 2023, officials signed a one-year, $101,000 deal with architecture firm Globetrotters to plan accessibility improvements at the existing Cermak hospital.
McLoughlin, with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, raised concern about the amount of money targeted for jail renovation.
“We regularly hear complaints from incarcerated people on the quality of food that people are given in the jail, the mold that's in the facility,” he said.
“It does not seem like the sheriff is actually listening to people in his custody, and these are oftentimes vanity projects rather than projects that actually benefit incarcerated people.
“I’m sure that this will look good as a WGN news story,” he added of the visitation center, “but it seems like that is oftentimes the goal here and it’s not actually about the health and safety of people in his custody.”
In recent years, local governments across the country have sought to rehabilitate the image of dilapidated, dangerous, and deadly jails and prisons.
Proposals, such as the Gloria Steinem–backed Women’s Prison Reform Project in New York City or Illinois governor J.B.
Pritzker’s plan to transform the state’s youth prisons into “residential centers,” seek to make carceral facilities appear more humane in response to widespread violence behind bars and growing public pressure to reform or outright dismantle the criminal legal system.
Melanie Newport, historian and author of This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, said this cycle of reform is one that’s been playing out for generations.
In the 1950s, she said, the Cook County jail lacked an outside phone line for incarcerated people to receive calls.
During the civil rights movement, some people were lost within the jail system, their families entirely unaware of their whereabouts.
During a wave of feminist movement activism during the 1970s, as more women were locked up for drugs and sex work, incarcerated mothers and advocates on the outside challenged a prohibition on children visiting the jail by coordinating visits with their parents’ court dates.
“The notion that the jail is obligated to people’s families is a relatively new invention of the jail’s role in the last 50 years,” Newport said.
“And the public has really had to demand that.
That’s not something that's necessarily been freely given by the jail.”
For virtually the entire history of the Cook County jail, incarcerated people have complained of squalid, undignified conditions.
Construction began in the 1920s to ease overcrowding at the neighboring Chicago House of Correction, which at the time imprisoned more than double the number of people it had been built to hold.
However, incarcerated people were left wanting from the day the jail opened in 1929; it lacked adequate heating and had no separate facility to incarcerate women.
The House of Correction and the jail existed in tandem, one operated by the City of Chicago and the other by the Cook County sheriff, until the state legislature unified the two under the Cook County Department of Corrections in 1969.
In the infancy of the CCDOC, the House of Correction and the Cook County jail remained largely separate entities.
But over the ensuing years, Winston Moore, the jail’s first Black warden, would consolidate power and lead the department on a path of ambitious transformation—and not for the better.
Winston Moore oversaw an extensive building program and a punitive crackdown at the CCDOC that began in the 1970s.
Rather than alleviate the jail’s many issues, the CCDOC came into being at the dawn of the mass-incarceration era.
The number of people confined to the nation’s prisons and jails exploded starting in the 1970s and continuing through the ’80s and ’90s.
In direct response to the carceral system’s racist policies, rampant violence, and abysmal living conditions, these decades also saw the rise of the prisoner rights movement, which demanded dignity for incarcerated people through passive resistance and overt force.
A profile in Ebony lauded Moore as “the warden who reformed ‘the world’s worst jail.’”
He did so through a flurry of jail construction and a culture of intimidation in an effort to delegitimize demands for improvement by Black radicals.
In 1971, Moore commissioned the CCDOC Building Program and Master Plan, an ambitious proposal that intimated the county’s long-term commitment to pretrial jailing and deradicalization.
Moore drew on a windfall of local, state, and federal grants—earmarked specifically for carceral construction that balanced control and rehabilitation—to realize his plans.
He once told Chicago Today, “Environment is key to the success of this plan.
Steel bars lend to an atmosphere of punishment and vengeance.
This doesn’t aid rehabilitation, which, after all, is supposed to be the purpose of the jail.”
He razed parts of the infamous House of Correction, added a women’s dormitory and two men’s dormitories that collectively totaled more than 429,000 square feet by 1973, and called for the addition of 5,600 new jail beds by 1995.
Yet replacement buildings constructed in the 1970s were plagued with issues from the start, including inoperable air-conditioning and sustained overcrowding.
Prisoners filed a stream of lawsuits that challenged, among other things, the practice of “double-bunking,” in which two or more people were forced to share single-capacity cells.
Monitors with the John Howard Association, an independent watchdog, found people sleeping on the floor in dirty, roach-infested buildings without mattresses or blankets.
This culminated in a consent decree in 1982, the beginning of more than three decades of federal oversight at the jail that sought to ease overcrowding and improve the poor treatment of incarcerated people.
The decree mandated the renovation and modernization of jail buildings, additional staffing, and improvements to food offerings.
An article on Roula Alakiotou's Division 11 in an 1995 issue of Glamour.
Facing potential fines of up to $1,000 for every day the sheriff’s office failed to reduce the jail’s population, the county turned to a new wave of construction in the 1990s.
The current Division 11, designed by architect Roula Alakiotou, sought to soften the jail’s image.
It traded long, dank cellblocks for more open, precast concrete pods that radiated out from a central tower.
Alakiotou originally intended the building to house women, but the jail’s persistent lack of space meant it was fashioned instead as a maximum security wing for some 1,600 men.
Nevertheless, the architect and jail officials heralded it as a correctional facility of the future.
“Alakiotou created what she hopes is a more humane jail,” read a 1995 article in Glamour about the building.
In a statement that reflected a similar attitude about the built environment’s impact on incarceration as Moore had expressed some 20 years earlier, she told the magazine, “In designing a pretrial facility, you have to think about the taxpayers’ dollars, but you also have to consider the dignity of the inmate who is, after all, presumed innocent.”
The Cook County jail's joint Residential Treatment Center and Reception Classification Diagnostic Center was completed in 2013.
The jail’s population crested at more than 10,500 people in 2013, before it began to slowly slip back down.
In 2017, federal oversight finally came to an end.
“Prior to the [Department of Justice] report,” wrote Sheriff Tom Dart in a news release at the time, “I began a systematic overhaul of the jail, working with the federal court and others to address the many issues identified.
Today, we have systems and structures that are looked at as a beacon for correctional facilities around the country.”
Despite Dart’s declarations, however, many people imprisoned at the jail found themselves confined in incommodious conditions.
Bunk areas were crowded and lacked sufficient space to store personal items.
Toilets and showers lacked privacy.
Day rooms, where incarcerated people spent most of their time, were dank and small, and virtually every building lacked outdoor recreation space.
Entire wings, and in some cases entire buildings, sat vacant after years of neglect and disrepair.
At the same time, national attitudes about policing and incarceration were undergoing another seismic shift.
The police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City, and Laquan McDonald in Chicago roiled cities across the country, as protesters proclaimed that “Black lives matter” and demanded an end to state violence.
Incarcerated people and advocates drew a direct line between the overt violence of police and the less-visible violence behind bars, pushing for bail reform, expanded programming, and the repeal of “tough on crime” policies, such as mandatory minimum sentences and so-called three-strikes laws, that had fueled the wave of jail and prison construction in the 1970s and ’80s.
Cook County jail’s Division 11 was designed by Roula Alakiotou.
It was against this backdrop that, in late 2016, the county enlisted STV/Heery to develop a new ten-year master plan for the CCDOC campus.
In the years since, buildings have come down, but nothing substantial has gone up to take their place.
The visitation center, then, offers the first glimpse at how a new phase of jail construction might take shape.
Its large, open windows and soft pendant lights are a radical departure from the cold, gray concrete interiors and imposing fortifications of jails past.
It trades an atmosphere of control for one rooted in the framework of trauma-informed design.
“What we’re building towards is a more community-centered approach, where individuals who might be under pretrial jurisdiction get reentry support at the earliest point of contact,” said Das, with the county’s Justice Advisory Council.
“That future next division, if there ever is one, is going to have to reflect something that’s far more consistent and builds upon the learnings of the enhanced visitation center and is not just an amalgam of generations of buildings of different divisions from one era of prison building to another.”
The idea that the built environment influences healing is not novel; it can be traced as far back as the ancient Greek city of Epidaurus and tea rituals in 12th-century Japan.
But its application in carceral spaces is a relatively new phenomenon, albeit one that has quickly gained traction over the past decade.
The architectural and engineering firm SMRT, for example, notes in a case study of its $149 million redesign of the Maine Correctional Center in 2022 that it incorporated natural light, bright pops of colors, and “normalized furniture” to “create a welcoming, human-scale environment to reduce anxiety and promote calmness and connection.”
DLR Group, the firm behind the Cook County jail’s visitation center, employs an entire team devoted to the design of prisons, jails, courts, and police stations.
In 2015, Studio Gang, the firm of renowned architect Jeanne Gang, developed the conceptual Polis Station to reframe police stations as “sites of social connection and services.”
The framework, based on the Tenth District station in North Lawndale, proposes equipping police stations with computer labs, nutritionists, and meditation gardens alongside traditional police infrastructure.
As part of its work, Studio Gang converted a portion of the Tenth District’s parking lot into a basketball court.
“By providing safe, shared outdoor recreational space on police property, this simple intervention has also built productive relationships between residents, officers, local officials, and donors that are leading to future investments in the neighborhood,” the studio writes in a case study.
Architect Paul Alt has spent his career contemplating the design of spaces that facilitate healing.
In 2016, he led a team of consultants to create the Healing Environment design guidelines for hospitals and community clinics run by the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs.
One of the core elements of spaces that are truly restorative, according to the guidelines, is partnership.
“Healing never occurs in isolation—it can only occur in community,” the guidelines read.
Alt’s work stands in contrast to more performative design trends in prisons and jails, which, after all, exist to separate people from their communities.
The 11 principles of trauma-informed design are outlined in DLR Group’s presentation on the Cook County jail’s new visitation center.
Newport, the historian, sees the tendency toward “friendly” carceral spaces as a way to market them for the modern day.
“The point of the jail is to reinforce trauma.
It’s about banishment from the community,” she said.
“An inviting jail spa, with earth tones and natural colors and soothing elements—it’s very much part of the story that the jail wants to tell about itself, but it’s not one that’s up-front or honest about the kind of violence the institution perpetuates.”
Responses to violence that are truly trauma-informed should take place outside jail walls, said Krig, with Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration.
“We should be thinking, ‘What are the things that actually need to be met upstream of criminalization?’’’
she said.
“How can we think about risk assessment in terms of how people experience poverty and abuse and addiction?
How do we support people in community settings?
“I think about prison reform as a kind of coercion itself—that there’s no world outside of this, and the best we can do is make it a little nicer,” Krig continued.
“The problem is that prisons and jails aren’t about actually responding to social problems.
They’re about maintaining this legacy of white supremacist patriarchy, and in that way, they’re absolutely doing what they set out to do.”
Analysis
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