The news reports out of Benton County, Arkansas, where the Crystal Bridges museum of American art is slated to open in 2009, are a fascinating snapshot of city planning. The idea of the museum has completely changed how residents of Bentonville and its neighboring cities perceive themselves and how they want to be perceived. For example, take yesterday’s meeting of the Justices of the Peace: there had been proposal to purchase a hospital in downtown Rogers and transform it into a juvenile detention facility. A quick survey tells me that, like so many other areas of the U.S., the justice system in Arkansas is broken, no less so for juveniles. “As many as 20 percent of first-offenders in state youth services are committed by juvenile judges for misdemeanors,” says this report. One upshot of that kind of incarceration rate is overcrowded prisons, the solution to which (obviously) is to create more or bigger prisons. Enter Crystal Bridges. At the Justices of the Peace meeting, the plan to buy the hospital was scuttled not because the justices believed they could solve the prison crisis another way, but because the thought of having prisoners be visible in downtown Rogers was unattractive. As Justice Debbie Hobbs put it, “It’s a beautiful square down there and with Crystal Bridges coming, I’m thinking we don’t need inmates lined up on the sidewalks.” Arkansas cities are no strangers to prisoners on the town square (and if I could fire up my old computer, I’d insert a photo, which my father took several years ago, of stripe-shirted prisoners sweeping streets around the White County courthouse). Embarrassment about prisoners in Rogers appears to be a projection of a new self-image inspired by an interpretation of what it means to be a community with an art museum, which local citizens are already internalizing. That the self-image happens to mirror other trends in U.S. treatment of prisoners—that is, hide them—is a convenient side effect.

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