This is a three-man cell in a Georgia prison, captured as a 3-D scan. It isn’t a drawing or an artist’s idea of a cell. It’s the room itself, measured by a scanner, with the bunks, the toilet, the sink and the door where they actually are.
Drag to look around. Scroll or pinch to zoom. Two-finger drag to move.
What you’re looking at
The room measures about 7 feet 8 inches by 12 feet 8 inches, roughly 97 square feet, with a ceiling of about 8 feet. Three men live in that space. The bunks are three high, with just enough room to lie down on your bunk. There is one desk to sit at, so the other two men have to decide: stand, lie on their bunk, or sit on the toilet. That might be acceptable while sleeping at night, but think about being locked in this room with two other men for weeks at a time. Two men you barely know and didn’t choose to live with.
Take away the bunks, the three wall lockers, the desk, the toilet and the sink, and what’s left is the strip of floor between the beds and the lockers: about 27 square feet. That is the entire open space in the room, shared by three grown men. It works out to about 9 square feet each, a square three feet on a side. It’s where you stand to dress, where you wait for the door, and where you stay out of the other two men’s way. The American Correctional Association’s own standard for a cell holding more than one person is 25 square feet of unencumbered space per occupant, measured the same way, with at least one dimension no shorter than seven feet (ACA Standard 4-4132). This cell has about a third of that per man.
Everything three people own, eat and do for most of every day happens inside those walls.
How to use the model
- Drag to turn the room. Scroll or pinch to zoom in and out.
- Zoom in through the walls to stand inside. The walls that would block your view fade out on their own.
- On a phone, use one finger to turn and two fingers to move.
The gaps and rough edges are scanner artifacts, not holes in the cell. A handheld scanner only records what it can see, and a cell has corners it can’t reach.
Why it matters
Georgia’s prisons hold far more people than they were designed for, and this is what that looks like from the inside. Our data on how full each prison is, and how that has changed, is on the facility pages and in End the Warehouse.