Just steps past the entrance to Monterey County Juvenile Hall a small, grim cell greets visitors. Industrial gray paint covers the walls and door and a hard bench, its only furniture, juts out from the wall. The heavy metal door features a small window, remnants of a scuffed swastika distorting the view.

Stepping inside the room, the first thing that hits you is the smell: An unpleasant combination of stale sweat and astringent chemicals.

“I’ve tried every cleaning product,” Probation Division Director Jose Ramirez said. “It just keeps coming back.”

Usually used for intake, this cell is the only place Ramirez has to put wards who need to have a meltdown in peace.

Cells like these aren't just providing secure lockup for wayward kids, experts say. This isn't just a bleak, stinking box. Its very design works against the mission of rehabilitation, making it statistically more likely that the boys and girls who pass through here will become career criminals, revisiting boxes like this throughout their lives and traumatizing their communities in the process.

Now, for the first time since these walls were built in 1959, Monterey County has a chance to do something about that.

More:Monterey County Jail inmates taken into custody by ICE dropped 83 percent

Over the past year, structures have begun to rise on the east side of Natividad Road, changing the correctional landscape. Just steps from each other, the juvenile hall and Monterey County Jail are respectively rebuilding and renovating, completely changing the way their population will interact with the buildings themselves.

As such, the detention facilities have begun attacking recidivism – the re-incarceration of inmates – through a different tack: Architecture.

America as a country is split between seeing incarceration as punishment or as a tool for rehabilitation. Even as criminal justice reform makes headlines in Washington, the debate about approach is playing out on small stages across the nation; this is one of them.

The hard-edged look of Monterey County's old hall stands in stark contrast to the architectural plans drawn up for the new campus, whose buildings are adorned with natural wood, colorful paints, skylights and plenty of educational space for the kids.

Monterey County Chief Probation Officer Marcia Parsons and Ramirez eagerly anticipate the final move to the new $52 million facility, which won’t happen until 2020.

“I’m not going to lock these kids in cells for nine months,” said Parsons.

Still, she said, the facility needs to walk a fine line.

“We want to make it safe and secure for the kids, but we don’t want to make it alluring,” Parsons said. “We don’t want them coming back. We want them thinking twice before they make that move.”

In recent decades, some architects have begun advocating for softer design in jails, prisons and other detention facilities. This approach could reduce recidivism, said Raphael Sperry, the president of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility.

According to research in behavioral psychology and correctional facilities, environment makes a difference in the behavior of incarcerated people. Efforts to soften environments have included incorporating materials that reduce stress-inducing noise levels, creating access to daylight, replacing bars on cells with doors, and providing child-friendly spaces for incarcerated parents to visit with their children.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world by far, and many re-offend and are re-incarcerated upon release. Through design, experts believe they can decrease the overall population behind bars.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons conducted research in the 1960s and 1970s that backed that idea up. The bureau found both officers and inmates were safer, rehabilitation improved and gang affiliation dropped when inmates were placed in more comfortable environments with officers interacting face-to-face, instead of from behind a thick plate of glass.

New York University Professor Richard Wener said that early research gave rise to later concepts of lowering recidivism through design.

Wener is one of the country's leading proponents of the approach. His work is frequently referenced by correctional facility architects and used by the architect of the juvenile hall redesign.

Wener has found that inmates' behaviors improved in more comfortable, safe environments with direct supervision by the staff. Assaults, rape and graffiti dropped.

More:Here's why juvenile justice changes may have an outsized impact in Salinas

"Most people that are going in are coming out again," said Wener. "How you treat people and how that affects them may have something to do with what’s going to happen when they get out.

"Incarceration – locking people up – is something that you do as punishment, as opposed to something that you do for punishment," said Wener. "The punishment is losing your freedom. We’re not locking them up so they experience something really horrible."

In Monterey County from 2011 to 2016, 41 percent of inmates released on probation were re-convicted of new crimes as of June 30, 2016, according to the 2016 Public Safety Realignment Report. According to a 2018 update to the study of recidivism by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 79 percent of state prisoners across the U.S. are rearrested within six years. Exact comparisons are not readily available.

With these new facilities, the sheriff’s office and probation department hope to lower those numbers.

Secure facilities that feel open and less secure are becoming more accepted in correctional facility architecture, according to Sperry.

For most of a decade, California has taken dramatic steps to mitigate the overcrowding of prisons after an order to reduce its prison population by a federal three-judge panel, upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 2012 Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 109 into law, one of the most dramatic acts in a series of reforms collectively often referred to as "realignment." The law shifted responsibility for a large group of the state's convicted criminals to the county jails and probation departments, removing them from the prison and parole systems managed by the state.

Monterey County Jail’s population swelled significantly.

The jail has struggled in safety and staffing levels; six inmates committed suicide between 2010 and 2015.

In 2013, a group of former and current inmates sued Monterey County and the jail's medical provider, claiming the jail's conditions violated law by failing to protect inmates from violence. The class-action suit also alleged insufficient accommodations for disabled inmates, and deficiencies in medical and mental health care.

The county settled for $4.8 million in 2015. The department agreed to expand its facilities and improve the way it treated its population, which was now included a large group of inmates with longer sentences.

Capt. Jim Bass has been involved with plans for an $89 million new jail almost since inception. Expected to be completed by the end of 2019, it is focused on safety and accommodation, he said.

The new building, designed around pre-cast cells made of rebar-reinforced concrete and steel, has a heavy profile. There is no place the inmates are not supervised, which Bass said would help to keep both them and staff safe.

Additionally, the design attempted to lower the number of disruptions to yard time, increase natural light and create a jail more accessible for an aging incarcerated population serving longer sentences.

The new building added meshed-in yards with a view of mountain ranges in the distance and more cells for disabled inmates. Its designers avoided tie-off points to help prevent suicide, relocated the plumbing so there are fewer disturbances when a plumber is called — which Bass said happens frequently. Inmates sometimes purposefully clog the toilets because they're bored or want to assert some control over their environments.

The design even tacked on eight new program spaces, which will be used not only for meetings such as Alcoholics Anonymous or religious services but also to connect inmates with potential employers before they finish their sentence.

“(That way) they have a face and a name they have a connection to and don't feel as frightened by the process by going, knocking on a door and not knowing somebody,” Bass said. “I think with realignment – AB 109 – all the state sheriffs are probably in a better position than the state was to handle reentry, because we have that connection with our local providers.”

Bass knows where every staircase, every broom closet, every elevator shaft lies in the new building. It's a real improvement over the old, he said, and he hopes the size increase — and program space in particular – will help reduce Monterey County's high recidivism rates.

Bianca Din, a tattoo artist who was incarcerated in the Monterey County Jail from 2012 to 2014, said the changes to the jail would be a tremendous help to its population.

A slight woman with a thick braid and tattoos gracing her hands, arm, and peeking out from beneath her shirt collar, Din said she’d been in and out of detention facilities her whole life, after first living on the streets at the age of 12. She chose to follow a mentor into gang life. She became familiar with incarceration.

Locked up in Monterey County Jail, Din found overcrowding, too few beds for disabled and pregnant women, dirt that inmates couldn’t scrub away and inadequate medical care.

She said the women joked they were like sardines, stacked on top of each other in triple bunks that lined the walls of common areas, even squeezed underneath staircases, where dirt from the stairs fell on them as they lay in their bunks.

In the chaos, Din said, she found new self-determination.

A switch flipped for Din when a root canal became badly infected, leaving her with a swollen face, in excruciating pain. She thought she would die in that crowded, rootless place.

“I knew I couldn’t live in here no more,” said Din, tearing up. “This can’t be what my life is going to end like. From the beginning, it’s been nothing but chaos and darkness. No. I needed to make that change.

“I didn’t want to live my life with no hope.”

When help arrived, she said, she knew she had to make a change.

Still, Din had key supporters she relied on to help her find employment after her release and to help her stay on track. She hopes the new building and program space would help other inmates turn their lives around without going through what she did.

The oppressive living conditions on top of the punishment of incarceration was simply too much, she said.

“You can’t just think the solution is to go into even deeper chaos,” said Din. “How can you even have the ability to rehabilitate your mind when you can’t even be in an environment that makes you feel safe and comfortable?”

“Regardless of what happens in our life…I don’t feel like being a sardine is going to be the answer," Din said. “We’re human, too."

Experts believe there's a better way.

Less than a football field’s distance from the new jail addition lies the juvenile hall.

The 1950s cinderblock-and-linoleum building will be dismantled in favor of a softer design, replaced by six buildings scattered along winding paths bordered by what will, one day, be grass.

The low-slung buildings with large windows into classrooms and sleeping areas feature 20-foot-high ceilings made of raw wood. Nearly every room has a skylight or window to bring in natural light, smells and sounds.

“If you put somebody in a square box that has no view to the outside, no view to the sky, they’re going to react to that. It’s a hardened environment and it’s going to antagonize them,” said architect Darrell Stelling, who designed the new version of the hall. “You give them a nice view to the outside, they can see sky, smell and hear things from outside, that makes them react differently.”

Stelling said he hoped the design elements would have a positive impact on recidivism rates in conjunction with kind, respectful treatment by staff. He saw the design as key to that relationship.

According to research done by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, proactive staff interaction with inmates is key to weeding out those stirring up violence or gang activity among inmates.

"Architecture has an effect but it’s part of a whole," Wener, the NYU professor, said. If the person running the facility is not committed to proactive officer-inmate interaction and rehabilitation, the facility design was immaterial.

More:Monterey County Juvenile Hall officer arrested for lewd acts with a child

"As one warden put it to us as we were doing a study of his jail, the design is a tool that a facility can use to achieve its goals," said Wener.

Parsons is well aware of the human element.

“My staff’s interaction with the kids in custody, the relationships they establish are so important: for the welfare of the kids in custody, for the welfare of my staff," said Parsons. “The more homelike we get the institutions, the better it is for the kids.”

Some might question the cost of building sun-soaked, verdant facilities to house inmates. But building jails, prisons and juvenile halls that are less harsh are not inherently more expensive, Wener said. In fact, he said, in many cases, it's cheaper.

Using porcelain toilet bowls, wooden doors, outfitting rooms with regular wooden furniture one might find in a dorm room: All these have been tried out in correctional facilities across the U.S., Wener said. They not only made prisoners feel a sense of normalcy, he said, they often saved taxpayers money.

Not only did the furnishings typically cost less, but inmates housed in these circumstances were more likely to make changes that helped them to not re-offend once released.

However, not every inmate does well in a less-restrictive environment. About 5 to 10 percent of the population will wreak havoc if put into a less-restrictive environment and needs to be sifted out into a higher-security portion of the facility in order for the majority of the inmates to feel safe enough to focus on rehabilitation, rather than self-preservation, Wener said.

Some in the architectural community see a more comfortable design as a good start but ultimately lacking.

Although there is a lot of interest in jail design as a way to improve rates of recidivism, Sperry said at its base it is a flawed concept, built upon racist, “tough-on-crime” assumptions about the incarcerated in the detention facilities.

The efficacy is questionable in comparison to simply good management, he added.

"To say that we’re going to provide particularly unpleasant conditions because these people have done something bad may satisfy some people’s sense of vengeance and some people’s concerns about how public monies are spent," said Wener, "But it really doesn’t get you to the goals of why you’re locking someone up in the first place and what you’re hoping happens after they get out."