THE NEWBURGH PATH
GSAPP Urban Design Studio Fall2014
collaborated with Anais Nimbro Garcia, Nans Voron, & Ross Brady
The prison system of the United States is locking up more people than any other nation on earth. New York State spends $60,000 per year on each inmate it houses. In the Hudson Valley, the city of Newburgh is a community in distress: a high rate of unemployment, poverty and high-school dropouts mar its image. Social services are seen as placing their unwanted clients there and offering little support for the rest of the city, effectively abandoning it. In response, we propose to reallocate certain resources from the prison system into Newburgh and other cities facing similar circumstances in the region, such as Middletown and Poughkeepsie.
The Newburgh Path allows offenders of non-violent crime with sentences of three years or less to be diverted from traditional imprisonment and instead be housed under various levels of observation and engagement within Newburgh. Through a series of steps, candidates in the program are reintegrated into society incrementally through job training, adult education and other initiatives. The infrastructure used to facilitate this process is shared with and available to the public in the form of vocational workspace, recreation and meeting space. Such efforts, if successful, could help eradicate this region’s problem with cyclical incarceration by shifting the focus from addressing its symptoms to addressing its causes.
According to an interview we conducted with a local police detective, as well as first-hand experience gained during a ride-along with the force, we determined a series of “hot spots” in Newburgh where crime is most likely to occur.These “hot spots” are areas with a concentration of commercial gathering spaces like bodegas and restaurants, where shootings are likely to occur.Also mapped here are the high number of vacant properties in the city, which are often used for criminal activity.
Between Newburgh and the Hudson Valley prison system, we see an opportunity to combine resources to reconcile a broken system with a city that has become its victim. By diverting money from the prisons themselves into Newburgh, we can offer the community opportunities for employment, education and recreation. To capture this money, we are also diverting from traditional prisons those convicted of non-violent crimes with sentences of three years or less, as this reflects a population that needs to be helped instead of punished
Candidates will apply for this program and to be treated as students; this will function as an alternative to prison and offer them a path to graduate back into society. This path is based is based on social interaction; to create this interaction we are making spaces and programs with the prison money to benefit both the community and these candidates through social interaction. Along this path, we define a threshold for interface between the public and the candidates