I’m no architect so I’m asking: Why would they build a prison with weird angles and hiding places? Is it impossible to make straight hallways that all meet at a guard station, and the guard has but to raise his eyes to see the whole place? And aren’t there ceiling mounted cameras that capture 360 degrees? If I was of a conspiratorial nature, I’d say those cameras they have look to be deliberately placed in order to obfuscate.
It would be useful to include a cite to whatever the hell you’re talking about.
I’m talking about the prison in which Jeffery Epstein died. It’s been in the news just a little bit. Jeffery Epstein was the pedophile trump was buddies with for years. There have been recent attempt to review the records the government has on Epstein, and there is resistance.
I know exactly who Epstein is / was.
Your OP sure sounds like you’ve seen drawings of the prison building, or interior pictures, or something. And you’re asking us for opinions on these things you’ve seen. It’s a lot easier for us to offer an opinion on a picture you’ve seen if we’ve seen it too.
Yeah, I’m sorry, Son_of_a_Rich but your OP seems to start from a given that Epstein’s prison was laid out with “with weird angles and hiding places” as opposed to that his minders were (…somehow…conveniently?) looking elsewhere when shit went down. And more to the detail of your OP I could be wrong but I don’t believe there have been many “panopticon” prisons built recently.
Just so we’re all clear, the facility in which he died is the Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan. It’s now closed due to deteriorating conditions.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know?
– “The Dreams in the Witch House” by H. P. Lovecraft
That wiki article certainly makes it seem like a full-on hellhole, not a Club Fed.
Keep in mind that it’s not an actual prison but a facility to hold those awaiting trial.
The place is located in lower Manhattan.That means the land is incredibly expensive. So the government would be trying to maximize the number of prisoners in a very limited land space. That could well result it in the prison not being designed the way the OP preferred.
Just noting that the design described above doesn’t even work. If you have a bunch straight hallways converging at a guard station, then by design the interiors of the cells themselves (which will be recessed along one or both sides of the hallways) will not be visible from the guard station.
What you actually want is something like the panopticon:
But in the classic conception, that leaves a lot of open/unused space. It doesn’t lend itself to cramming as many inmates as possible into as little real estate as possible (which I have to imagine is a goal in Manhattan, if inmates are going to be detained there at all). It also predates modern surveillance technology and is based more on the psyche of the inmate—never certain they aren’t being watched, and thus supposedly afraid to engage in any misbehavior—than it does on making it actually practical to watch every inmate at every moment.
ETA: And even when you really do try to watch every inmate continuously or near-continuously, shit still happens, in large part because people are not machines and really can’t keep their attention fixed indefinitely on one subject. They literally had a guard standing outside every cell at Nuremberg, for example, when the highest level offenders were being tried. And yet several prisoners still managed to commit suicide.