Just before Thanksgiving 18-year-old Nicholas Feliciano became the latest casualty of Rikers Island. Mr. Feliciano, who had a history of suicide attempts, got injured in a fight with other inmates and was transferred to a unit where guards watched for seven minutes — and did nothing — while he tried to kill himself. He ended up in a medically induced coma.

To countless New Yorkers, the news was only more confirmation why tearing down Rikers can’t happen soon enough. Its demolition has become a kind of collective cleaning of the slate, a moral reboot for the city, another rallying cry for the prison abolition movement. The plan now is to shutter Rikers by 2026 and replace it with four smaller jails, one in each borough save for Staten Island.

If we’re going to keep building jails, can new architecture help heal what ails the penal system? Jails are works of architecture, after all. Their designs, including how they present themselves on the street, give physical form to society’s shifting attitudes about justice.

Today Americans seem more divided than ever on most things but criminal justice reform is an issue that unites Charles Koch and Black Lives Matter. Although New York’s murder rate is up this year, in recent decades crime has significantly fallen. Along with much-debated bail reforms, decriminalization of some lesser offenses, speedier court adjudications and alternative supervision, the city is reducing incarceration. Back in 1991, at the peak of the crack epidemic, city jails housed more than 21,000 inmates. The jail population has dropped to 6,700. The four new jails would accommodate 3,300 detainees.