Can a prison be beautiful? And should it?

"Stone walls do not a prison make," said Richard Lovelace in his poem "To Althea, From Prison." But they do come in handy. But what kind of wall, and why? The proposal to close the 111-year-old Stillwater prison by June 30, 2029, lends a good opportunity to look at the prisons and jails of Minnesota, and what their style says about the culture that produced them.

State correctional facilities

There are 12 correctional facilities in Minnesota. Three bear particular architectural significance, ranging from the forbidding walls of yore to the bland, modern facades.

Minnesota Correctional Facility — St. Cloud. Built in 1889, it has the haunted, gloomy look we may associate with the late 19th century. It was originally intended as a reformatory, housing inmates between 16 and 30 years old, who presumably were not set on an irredentist course and could be changed into useful members of society. A granite stone wall covers a mile and half of the prison's perimeter and is believed to be the world's second-longest prisoner-constructed wall.

From a distance, it looks like an ominous fort, intended to contain and deter. But the main building has more beauty than you might expect. It's almost churchlike — except for the bars on all the windows. Why? Because it was intended to change the spirit of its occupants, not break it.

Minnesota Correctional Facility — Red Wing. Also finished in 1889, the Romanesque-style jail for juveniles, with a tall clock tower, could be mistaken for a city hall or county courthouse. It says something about the earnest civic mood of the day. Paris-trained architect Warren Dunnell was picked to design the main building. He also designed the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children, a hospital in Fergus Falls and a veterans' retirement home. They all shared the same idea — state buildings that shelter the unfortunate need not look unfortunate themselves.

Stillwater prison. By the time of the building's completion in 1914, the aspiration to beauty was replaced with economical practicality. The sole concession to ornamentation are two thick Doric columns straddling the entrance, holding up an undersized pediment. The massive wings that house the prisoners are faceless facades of repeating vertical windows, lending it all an impersonal, indifferent appearance. The buildings are almost indistinguishable from the factories of the era, or, perhaps more apt, the industrial warehouses.

City jails

Jails are not prisons, although in the popular mind they're interchangeable — "places where lawbreakers get locked up, and you do not want to be in." Jails are for pretrial detention and lighter sentences and run by city or county governments. The state or federally run prisons are for heavier misdeeds.

Prisons located in urban centers have a particular challenge: Citizens don't want a jail that looks like an apartment building, because it implies the inmates are having an easy go. But citizens don't want something ugly and foreboding, either. There's no reason the streetscape should be brought low by a forbidding hulk with barbed wire and bars.

The Ramsey County Adult Detention Center. St. Paul built a jail on the banks of the Mississippi in 1979, a decision that seems unthinkable today, like plopping a smelting factory on Lake Harriet. The Ramsey County jail was a high-tech building that incorporated the contemporary theories on incarceration. It had no bars on the outside windows and featured spacious common areas. The jail was indistinguishable in style from a college dorm, which either says something about enlightened prison design or the dreary red-brick late modern styles of college campuses.

Its replacement in 2003, the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center at 425 Grove St., looks like a convention center in a medium-sized Midwestern town. The adjacent six-story structure doesn't have a lot of windows, but it doesn't say "jail." It could just as easily say "1956 office building."

If you want to know how far jail design and its integration into the civic landscape has come, the Google reviews for the facility include a one-star review that notes: "The espresso machine was broken." They weren't saying that about Stillwater.

Hennepin County Public Safety Facility. Finished in 2000, the facility at 401 4th Av. S. in Minneapolis adds to the jail space already available in City Hall. "Public safety facility" is a nice euphemism, and looks better over the door than "holding cells."

It gives off the Graybar Hotel vibe, and the giveaway is the slit windows. A modern building with slits of glass suggests the occupants do not deserve a generous view. But the building strikes an acceptable balance between function and civic enrichment. The ground floor is marked by friendly circular shapes, from the entrance to the curved glass wall to the thick columns that lift the rest of the building up and away, as if protecting the street from its occupants.

The building also forms a hinge between City Hall and the Public Service building, with a plaza that provides a ration of open space between the corner-hugging neighbors.

It's possible to walk through the building and enjoy its aesthetics — the skyways have nice stained glass. The second-story pass-through is hushed and sedate; no sounds of tin cups angrily raked across metal bars. It could be a suburban building where you visit your dentist. The incarceration facility is so integrated into the city you can walk through it untroubled on your way to get a cup of coffee.

Prisons and jails have come a long way in a hundred years, but as with other changes in the streetscape: styles change. But the purpose remains.