The EconomistJune 29th 2019 United States 372 tion to under 5,000. This is far less than the
nearly 8,000 housed at Rikers, but it is in
line with current trends. New York’s pris-
oner count has already fallen 30% since Mr
de Blasio took office in 2014; jail admis-
sions are down nearly 50%. Meanwhile,
crime continues to fall.
Architects will submit proposals in
2020, but the city is already casting about
for models. Officials have visited the 1,500-
bed Van Cise-Simonet Detention Centre in
Denver, Colorado. This building, which
opened in 2010, offers some lessons. With
its limestone façade, Van Cise-Simonet
looks more like a museum or a university
library. The interior is notable for its open
spaces and the natural light from its bar-
less windows. A booking area for new in-
mates resembles a bus terminal, with a few
holding cells for those who misbehave.
Instead of long grey corridors lined with
clanging metal-doored cells, inmates stay
in smaller units that hold up to 64 people,
plus a deputy. In theory this reduces vio-
lence among inmates and against staff be-
cause officers get to know the prisoners
and can see problems before they arise. The
pods have areas for meals, classes and re-
creation, which limits the risk that comes
from taking inmates to and from their beds
several times a day. The facility also has a
full medical unit, a mental-health unit and
two courtrooms to handle misdemeanours
and preliminary hearings.
“Environments cue behaviour,” says
Ken Ricci of cgl, a consulting firm, who
was a principal designer of Van Cise-Simo-
net and is a member of the mayor’s task-
force to close Rikers. Sunlight and better
acoustics improve life for the staff. The
Denver jail suggests design has its limits,
though. Overcrowding and short-staffing
dogged the facility for years, and a report in
the Denver Postin 2017 found that the num-
ber of assaults between inmates and
against staff had started going up. The city
spent around $12m to settle claims from
the deaths of two inmates, in 2010 and 2015,
one of whom was mentally ill.
Mr Ricci is quick to concede that the de-
sign of Van Cise-Simonet is not perfect.
Zoning constraints on the height and
width of the building left inmates and staff
with less elbow room and made view-ob-
scuring pillars structurally necessary—an
architect’s nightmare. Attracting and re-
taining staff is hard when the unemploy-
ment rate is so low, especially as the job
now demands an ability to manage psychi-
atric emergencies and behave more like a
social worker, rather than merely booting
recalcitrant inmates in the stomach. “Our
goal is to send these people back to the
community in better shape than how they
came to us,” says Elias Diggins, the Denver
Sheriff Department chief and the president
of the American Jail Association. Better de-
sign is a good start, but only that. 7
E
xcitedfansinbaldeaglebaseball
caps watched as the United States
women’s football team beat Spain to
progress to the quarter-finals of the
World Cup on June 24th. This was no
shock upset. The Stars and Stripes are the
most successful side in the history of
women’s football, having won the World
Cup three times and Olympic gold four.
This year they romped through the group
stages with an aggregate score of 18-0, a
total inflated by their record-breaking
13-0 drubbing of lowly Thailand.
This on-pitch success, however, is
marred by controversy in court. The
members of the United States women’s
team marked International Women’s Day
on March 8th by filing a class-action suit
against their employer, the United States
Soccer Federation (ussf). The suit alleged
that differences in pay and employment
conditions between the women’s and
men’s team violate the Equal Pay Act and
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Despite
engaging in “substantially equal work”,
the women’s team is paid considerably
less. If each team were to play 20 friend-
lies over the course of a year and win
them all, the women would receive
$99,000 whereas the men would net
$263,320, according to the filing.
It is common for female athletes to be
paid less than men. The combined sala-riesofthe1,693womenplayinginthetop
seven football leagues add up to $41.6m,
just slightly less than the $41.7m salary
paid to Neymar, a Brazilian forward, by
Paris Saint-Germain. But football in
America is unusual because the women’s
team is paid less than the men, despite
more people tuning in to watch them.
Such pay differences are permissible
if the employer can prove that one of four
“affirmative defences” apply: a seniority
system, a merit system, a pay system
based on quantity or quality of output or
any other factor apart from sex. The
burden of proof is on the ussfto prove
that the disparity can be legitimately
explained by one of these four. The feder-
ation has attributed the discrepancy to
“differences in the aggregate revenue
generated by the different teams and/or
any other factor other than sex.” The
success of the lawsuit depends on
whether this is true.
A Wall Street Journalinvestigation
into audited financial reports from the
ussfsuggests that it is not. Between 2016
and 2018 women’s games generated
about $50.8m in revenue. The men took
in about $49.9m. That alone is not
enough to settle the case. This money
came mostly from ticket sales, but that is
not the only source of revenue attribut-
able to the national teams. Much of it
comes from broadcast rights and spon-
sorship deals. As these are bundled
together, it is difficult to assess how
much ought to be attributed to each
team. It is, however, hard to believe that
the men’s team, whose best result has
been third place in the 1930 World Cup
and who failed to qualify last time round,
is such a sought-after commodity as to
justify the pay disparity.
Having qualified for the knockout
stages of the World Cup, the 28 female
players agreed to pursue mediation once
the tournament ends. This is unlikely to
resolve the matter. Legal disputes over
equal pay have been going on since five
players filed a complaint with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission
in March 2016. This has effectively been
subsumed by the class-action suit. A
previous effort at mediation fell apart in
March. The team is now two matches
away from the final at the Parc Olym-
pique Lyonnais. Whether they make it
there will be decided on the pitch. How
they are compensated for their efforts is
likely to be decided in court.Better play, lesser pay
(Proper) footballWhere female athletes are more popular than male ones, and still get paid lessCo-captain America