Book Review: Corrections & collections: Architectures for art and crime

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567717717316
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Michael Welch
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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International Criminal Justice Review 27(3)
important insights on social distance between participants and researchers. Overall, the authors
carefully weigh cultural, social, political, and historical factors to shed light on how teens turn to
violence as a solution, so it contributes to an understanding of how institutions fail youth and
perpetuate a cycle of injustice for those most vulnerable in society. Recommendations for a more
holistic comprehension of youth violence are offered.
Joe, D. (2013).
Corrections & collections: Architectures for art and crime.
New York, NY: Routledge. 312 pp. $42.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-53482-6 (paperback).
Reviewed by: Michael Welch, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
DOI: 10.1177/1057567717717316
In this intriguing exploration of prisons and museums, architect Joe Day delivers rare commentary
on the tandem impulse to contain unprecedented numbers of convicts and assemble massive collec-
tions of art. Their obvious common denominator is the construction of buildings designed to
accommodate both ambitions. Correspondingly, the expansion of architectural projects attracts a
wide assortment of visionaries and artists as well as insiders and hustlers. Together, they orchestrate
spectacles and discipline while pushing the extremes between freedom and constraint, or according
to Day, new architectures for the beautiful and the damned. As Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz,
Ecology of Fear) fittingly points out in the foreword, the tendency to warehouse surplus people and
overvalued objects is the expression of a single social logic—one that is propelled by a hybrid of
aesthetic minimalism, traffic management, and neo-Benthamism. “Thus jaded correctional
officers,” Davis writes,
sit in front of monitors watching stored human objects masturbating, screaming or simply vegetating,
while self-conscious museum visitors feign sophisticated appreciation of more and more contrived art
installations while a voice inside their head asks,...