For three years, Andrew Osborne helped his bosses promote the idea that good design could make imprisonment more humane. As a public relations specialist at DLR Group, one of the largest architecture firms in the world, he crafted campaigns for multimillion dollar projects, like the construction of a “youth campus for empowerment” in Nashville. Or the rebuild of San Quentin state prison—former home of California’s death row—into a “rehabilitation center.” It wasn’t about simply adding more windows, he argued in marketing material. Prisons could be revamped to prioritize education; jail space could be set aside to help people through mental health crises instead of booking them into the system.
“I was selling the shit out of it,” Osborne says. “I genuinely was a convert.” A 34-year-old creative type, he’d taken the job at DLR Group after earning master’s degrees in philosophy and English literature. He truly believed the design firm, which has over 30 offices and rakes in at least $500 million in annual revenue, was committed to the stated ethos of its Justice+Civic division: to pursue “healing, equity, and transformation for the individual and community” as “stewards of the built environment.”
So when he found out on February 4 that DLR Group held a current contract to turn an old private prison in Oklahoma into a new detention center used to hold the immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s escalated, increasingly deadly ICE operations—the sense of betrayal was instant. “I think what ICE is doing is the worst thing America has probably done since the internment camps during World War II,” he tells me, comparing the agency’s use of racial profiling in arrests to the mandatory incarceration of Japanese Americans. “It’s horrific, they’re shooting people, and here I am hating that in my heart of hearts. And it turns out my company is involved in it.”
Internet is funny. When the news is top lawyers at DOJ leave, people are like why can’t you stay and fight.
When someone like this guy stays and fights, people are like, oh he just sees the writing on the wall and doesn’t want to get strung up.
Which is it, internet?
“I was selling the shit out of it,” Osborne says. “I genuinely was a convert.”
I don’t buy your remorse for one second. It took you 3 YEARS to have this moment of clarity?
The guys and I took a look at how this is going… And well… We think when they start building the guillotines… We’d sure like to not be fresh in everyone’s mind.
This. He made his money, he saw where all this was heading and now it’s time to bail out and fake some remorse before the really heinous shit starts.
I mean, that definitely could be. But, better late than never? And the way the article read, it sounded to me like the person was trying to use architecture as a poison pill from the inside to do better. Not gonna solve the system, and he swears by doing right. Which does seem to address humanity, which is a good step. He could be absolutely full of bullshit, but he could also be one of those people trying to fight the good fight.
I dunno. Maybe my standards are tanking with how things have been going.
Look regardless of the reason… Any bit helps the cause. So I’m happy to see it.
I do like your take on it. It seems totally plausible… Not many people want to risk their jobs so that would be one way to approach it as safely as possible.
I want to have hope.
Donald Trump committed treason against the United States on January 6th 2021. Anyone who supports/defends/works for/apologizes for/votes for/etc is complicit with this treason.
Those of us americans who oppose this fascist pile of shit are the true patriots.
(had this idea on the back burner for a while and this was the first post since then that was vaguely relavent so yeah)
You’re god damn right about this fellow patriot.
And after that, we found out that he stole hundreds of top secret classified documents, with the intention of selling them. And before anyone disputes that: yes he did, you know he did, he has NO other explanation. What else was he going to do with those docs, bedtime reading? Even Jack Smith thought it was a tighter case than even the Insurrection.
He’s the most prolific traitor in American history, worse than ALL the other American traitors, COMBINED. Nobody is even close. Anyone else would hang for this much treason.
I call him Benedict Donald
there were several things that he did that should have put the bastard in prison forever. I like to point to “Treason Day” as the big one that no one can possibly ignore. For fucks sake it was on live tv!
I watched every second. I love it when people who only know what theyve seen and heard on Fox News try to gaslight me.
Power to these defectors! I hope this encourages more people in every industry to refuse to touch any projects with ICE involvement.
Working for ICE in any capacity should be considered a radioactive PR nightmare.
It will be later. Those people will be doxxed eventually.
*concentration camps
It always bothers me that the German concentration camps in the US during WWII are never mentioned.
I didnt even know germans were interned. But I do think there is relevant context.
120,000 Japanese-Americans were concentrated, 2/3rd of which were citizens. 127,000 lived on the continental US. There were 150,000 living in Hawaii of which only 1,800 were confined.
Meanwhile German-Americans numbered in 12 million, of which 11,500 (described as overwhelmingly German Nationals but cannot find hard numbers) were forcibly detained. I cannot find numbers for family members who voluntairily entered the camps who are also uncounted.
They’re both injustices, but one does seems more egregious than the other. Both in raw numbers and in proportion.
But thanks for that wikipedia dive.
Although I agree that it’s an injustice, I also don’t forget that the first Japanese Americans that got the choice chose for Japan and betrayed the US.
It’s very broad and will hurt far more innocent than (potentially) guilty people, but it’s important not to underestimate the nationalism ingrained into some people through ethnicity and upbringing either
3 people in a single incident is hardly enough evidence to indict an entire already heavily discriminated populace, that’s just racism.
Sure, and for the record I don’t condone that choice.
But I also think it’s naive to claim that it must be pure racism. From a military/intelligence point of view, it’s just far more likely to find collaborators when they have a link to the other side.
Those 3 aren’t proof that all Japanese Americans would have collaborated, but it’s still interesting that the very first that found themselves in that position and having almost no other information, immediately chose to betray the US. I don’t really think that would have happened if they were of Chinese descent, for example.
The main focus in my history classes that I remember were on Japanese internment.
Exactly. The only reason my school taught about the German ones was because we had one in the area.
That’s good. But also no new prison beds without an equal or greater number destroyed. The number of prisoners rises to meet the number of beds, not the other way around. Probation is often granted or denied on whether there’s someone to fill the bed, not on the merits of the prisoner
In Alabama where I’m from it depends on if the can put them to work and take their labor. If they work, they can work in public and go home and see their families some weekends, but have to stay in prison because they are “too dangerous”.
Like, I’m in favor of stuff like that if it was about slowly reconnecting them to their lives rather than just dumping them outside the gates in bumfuck nowhere with what they had on their person instead of it being what you described or a means to give privilege to wealthy prisoners
I’ve never heard of that, but I also haven’t heard of much. That seems like a pretty grave systemic problem worth investigating and fixing…
I know you said probation is granted… I’m guessing you mean if capacity is met? That seems to imply that if a prison is under capacity, it somehow encourages imprisonment. Is that the case? Because if so, that’s super disturbing.
I’ve mostly heard about it from prison abolition activists, but when I looked it up most of what I found was prison quotas for private prisons.
One prison ab story is that even state owned prisons have an incentive to stay full as they’re often a major employer in a rural district, so there’s a politician committed to ensuring there’s plenty of jobs at the prison and focus on crime can be tweaked around that.
Awful.
