IPIC2024-PID057 by Rob Fisch and Marayca Lopez

Creating Better Models for Youth Facility Design

Authors

Rob Fisch

Principal/ Justice Sector Leader, DLR Group, United States

Rob Fisch is a Principal and Justice Sector Leader at DLR Group, Architects, Planners and Engineers. He leads planning and design for some of the firm’s major corrections projects. Over the past 33 years, Mr. Fisch has served as a consultant to judges, prosecutors, legislators and corrections administrators, as well as other justice system stakeholders. He is widely recognized for his analytical and cognitive ability to develop a sound foundation for consensus-based needs assessments, master plans and facility solutions. His experience encompasses courts, corrections and juvenile justice. His most recent adult corrections projects are a “Re-Imagining” of a large urban jail in Pittsburgh, and a comprehensive plan to close New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex to be replaced with four new urban jails across the City. In the juvenile justice realm, he is currently leading design efforts for three juvenile detention campuses in New Jersey and planning for a new model for NYC’s Horizon juvenile detention complex. He also has extensive courthouse planning and design experience.
Mr. Fisch has a BA in Environmental Design from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a Certified Planner by the American Planning Association and is also LEED accredited from the U.S. Green Buildings Council. He has lectured extensively at planning, design and security conferences in the US and abroad, and has been cited in various printed and electronic media on the topic of justice facility planning and design.

Marayca Lopez

Criminologist/ Justice Planner, DLR Group, United States

Marayca is an expert consultant of distinguished ability and accomplishment in the field of criminal justice with an extensive education and international background in penology and criminology. Having exclusively dedicated her academic and professional careers to the justice sector, she possesses a keen understanding of the overall criminal justice system.

Her body of work is international in scope. She has participated in a wide array of criminal justice reform projects and prison studies, both domestically in the USA and abroad (e.g., Australia, Canada, Europe, Central and South America), resulting in worldwide expertise and a deep understanding of correctional best practices, prison operations, and innovative models for offender management and intervention.

In her current role as a Justice and Civic Sector Planning Leader for DLR Group she is responsible for planning and programming multiple correctional facilities that are holistic in their approach, preserve human rights, promote rehabilitation, healing, and treatment, are safe and humane, and focused on innovative operational and programmatic models for positive behavioral change and successful re-entry.

Whether as volunteer, collaborator, or lobbyist, she is actively involved with different international organizations that share the common goal of advancing the field of criminal justice and improving conditions of confinement for individuals deprived of liberty. She has an on-going collaboration with the UN Friends of Corrections and Penal Reform International (PRI) on issues related to the humanization of prisons, monitoring of detention practices, and improvement of incarceration conditions.

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