Arriving at a prison – any prison – still makes my heart race a little faster. I have been to more than 100 prisons for my research into how architecture and design can assist in rehabilitating offenders. But my first visit after 18 months of lockdown, to a prison deep in one of England’s most rural counties, felt especially disorienting. I sat quietly for a moment looking up at the towering wall that encircles the car park. It’s topped with coils of razor wire that unfurl like a giant, spiky Slinky, scaring off curious pigeons, but catching every plastic carrier bag that floats on the breeze.
The surly brick edifice doesn’t reveal an obvious entrance. Straight ahead is a large door, but it’s for the vehicles that bring inmates to the prison. You’ll probably have seen the white escort vans on the motorway. Known as “sweatboxes” or “meat wagons”, they are three-tonne trucks with darkly tinted square windows placed high up on the side. Inside are small compartments like upright coffins, three feet wide, three feet deep and seven feet tall, with a moulded plastic seat and no seatbelt. Some people spend long hours in these vans as they are transported, sometimes hundreds of miles, between courts and prisons.
The white vans pass through an airlock into an interior courtyard and come to a halt immediately outside the entrance, where prisoners are cuffed and taken one at a time into reception, their clothes and belongings removed and placed in storage for the duration of their sentence. Reception is often described as the most aggressive part of the prison. At the time when they most need it, the prisoner is given no chance to discuss the reality of the world they are entering, or their fears concerning any unresolved problems on the outside. These opportunities might come eventually, but at the point of greatest stress, the needs of the system come before the needs of the individual.
Prison turns people into a homogenous mass, a shoal of indistinguishable grey fish. On arrival, every new inmate is given a bundle of prison-issue clothing that may have been passed down through generations and faded from wash and wear. In time, they may be able to wear their own clothes if they behave well. They’re allowed to take to their cell enough personal belongings to fit into two reasonably large boxes. All other property must be left in storage.
All but the most recently built prisons are marked by filth and neglect – a symbolic as well as literal violation, and a reminder to prisoners that they’ve been rejected by society, that they themselves are viewed as waste. Even worse than the bare walls, thick bars and uncomfortable furniture are the traces of previous generations. Boredom, frustration, pain and despair are evident in the knocks, the scratchings, the gougings, the graffiti, the grime, the burns, the stains, the remnants of body fluids. Prisoners are all too aware of the beatings, bullying and self-harm that have happened in the place they now must call home. In response to my question, “What colour is prison?”, one young woman in an English establishment replied, “Purple, like a bruise.”
It’s easy to lose your own sense of humanity when all you can see is cages and bars and metal furniture and wire, and nobody calls you by your first name, and you’re weighed, fingerprinted and body-searched as if you’re on an assembly line. This also goes for the staff processing new arrivals.
I am a professor of criminology, and have spent my career researching prisons and advising on their design. I’ve had some success in persuading architects to create prisoner reception areas that are more humane – welcoming, even – and have encouraged them to design comfortable waiting rooms with armchairs and TVs, adjacent to light, bright processing areas where prison staff can offer new arrivals a hot drink and something to eat after their long journey in the meat wagon. My hope is that civilising surroundings might encourage officers to extend a handshake and look prisoners in the eye, but some remain firmly of the opinion that it’s demeaning to serve the people in their charge.
I try to encourage the architects I work with to design an environment that makes its occupants feel like people rather than prisoners. Most professionals involved in the commissioning, planning and designing of corrections facilities don’t think of prison inmates as being in any sense like them, let alone regarding them with compassion or empathy.
So the question I find myself asking professionals in the system, as well as those who pitch for contracts, is: what would it take to incorporate humanity into prison design?
The history of prison design has been a catalogue of well-meaning experiments with predictably tragic outcomes. The very first closed prisons of the 18th century were based on two experimental approaches: the “silent” system, adopted in the US, where inmates were put to hard labour and had to remain quiet at all times, and the “separate” system, favoured in the UK, in which prisoners were kept apart, only leaving their cells to exercise in separate yards or attend chapel, when they wore hoods to hide their faces.
In practice, there was little difference between the systems. Both adopted solitary, cellular confinement, meaning the fabric of the building was harmonised with the enforcement of the punitive regime. It was, in effect, not just the birth of the prison, but the birth of the super-maximum-security prison, or supermax.
There are probably an infinite number of problems that can sabotage the best of intentions but, in my experience, there are six things that will inevitably scupper a well-meaning vision for a prison.
One is trying to build on the cheap – or, as architects call it, “value engineering” – which invariably results in a lack of creativity in design. As the architect of HMP Oakwood in Staffordshire once told me: “It’s just a cost-cutting exercise … It’s just reducing costs again and again. It’s sad, but we’ve got to a stage where we’re actually stripping back our designs. The only innovation of the last four or five years is how to do more for less.” What this means, in practice, is anything that “softens” the environment or makes a prison feel more therapeutic or simply more humane – such as trees and landscaping – frequently gets vetoed at an early stage.
The second problem is overcrowding. Imagine designing a state-of-the-art apartment block with gardens, water features and attractive community facilities. Now, stuff it with four times more residents than it was designed to hold. You wouldn’t expect it to feel safe or emotionally sustaining, would you?
Many prison authorities try to head off problems of overcrowding by commissioning massive prisons that hold thousands of inmates. This is third on my inventory of bad ideas. The UK’s foremost commentator on 20th-century prison design, Leslie Fairweather, wrote in 1961 that the size of a building will determine the quality of relationships to a remarkable degree. “These relationships will not develop healthily in huge, impersonal blocks of cells where the individual is dwarfed by the overpowering size of the structure,” he said at a time when a prison holding 400 people was considered “very large”. Today, new prisons holding about 1,700 inmates are the norm in England and Wales, but HMP Berwyn in north Wales, which opened in 2017, has capacity for 2,106 men.
Taking a prison designed for one purpose and using it for an entirely different purpose is fourth on my list. I’ve seen many a good prison design thwarted by its operational use. There’s a corrections facility at Wiri in New Zealand known as Auckland South. The innovative prison was designed on a “responsible prisoner” or “progression-regression” model, which has proven effective in preparing inmates for re-entry into society. Men would start their prison journey in basic accommodation and progress to better housing if they behaved themselves, completed education and addressed their offending histories.
The prison accommodation forms a semicircle, so residents can see the standard of housing ahead of them in the chain, culminating in independent cottages with gardens and access to five-a-side soccer pitches. If they misbehave, they have to go back to more basic quarters. But the New Zealand prison system quickly became bloated and unmanageable. Remand prisoners were sent to Wiri, which compromised the design because untried and unsentenced inmates remained in basic conditions, unable to “progress”, and were likely to be sent to other prisons on conviction. The perennial problem of gang affiliations put the final nail in the coffin, as officers just placed prisoners wherever they could in order to keep rival factions apart.
Kneejerk reactions to security problems are the fifth of my no-nos, which is another problem that has plagued New Zealand’s prisons. A disturbance at Spring Hill led to a hardening of the architecture. Everything that had been green was turned grey. Gardens were turned into yards, and high mesh fences topped with razor wire were erected around them. Wooden, picnic-style furniture was replaced with thin metal benches bolted to the ground. This all happened because of one incident that could have been handled differently.
Finally, failure to recruit or retain staff inevitably compromises the smooth running of prisons. Insufficient numbers of officers and other staff means that even those prisons that have progressive intentions at the outset will see their art classes discontinued, their family visit days cut back, and their therapeutic gardens unused.
This list of potential problems is far from exhaustive, but it sums up what can go wrong if the prison authorities are always managing crises.
In a brand new $1bn facility in Utah, US, money has been spent on traditional security and control measures, rather than anything that could be described as imaginative or humane. Staffing shortages have led to overcrowding. Inmates sleep in dormitories containing eight bunks, which can lead to bullying and assault. Another, entirely predictable, problem has been caused by the decision to build the prison on wetlands. A mosquito-infested prison would be my very definition of the seventh circle of hell. The prison authorities would not allow inmates to have insect repellent because it’s flammable and they feared it could be used as a weapon or for self-harm. Prisoners had to walk outside to get their food, but were turning down opportunities to exercise because they got so badly bitten. The impact was underlined by the wife of a prisoner who told a TV station in Salt Lake City, “He’s angry. He’s depressed. He has no hope. I’m starting already not to recognise him.”
What would an architecture of hope look like for prisoners? Or, to put it another way, how can architecture help to give people in prison a future orientation: an investment in their lives going forward? Prisoners usually have fairly ordinary aspirations. Unlike prison reformists who harbour ambitious hopes of rehabilitation based on wholesale changes in personality and circumstances, prisoners mainly hope that their families are OK, and will still be there waiting for them when they get out. In fact, a home, a family and a job are the things most likely to contribute to ex-offenders going straight. So, if we were to try to use design to reduce recidivism, the most effective way of doing it would be to design out the worst aspects of imprisonment (separation from family, severance from work, isolation in hostile spaces) and design in elements that encourage attachments and situations that are strongly linked to success on release.
A former prison inspector, who spent much of her career working as a psychologist in the high-security estate, shared her view of the role of custodial environments: “Does the space continually say to them, ‘You are a prisoner and a criminal,’ not to be trusted or respected, or does the space say, ‘You are a father,’ in a well-designed visiting area? Or, ‘You are a cook,’ in a homely residential unit kitchen, or, ‘You are a craftsman,’ in a workshop where they are gaining qualifications? One environment allows hope to flourish and another kills it off.”
To encourage family visits, prisons could be located in places that are easily reached. Architects could do more to make reception and visiting areas welcoming for children. Prisoners who make concerted efforts to overcome addictions could be rewarded with better accommodation, and with initiatives such as the master gardener programme that used to run at HMP Rye Hill in Rugby but is sadly now defunct. Prisoners there proudly told me about the bee-friendly garden they designed. One said, “Organic gardening has helped me understand the harm I’ve done myself. We don’t put chemicals on the vegetables we grow, so why did I spend all them years putting toxic chemicals in my body?”
Sometimes, prisoners’ good intentions will come to nothing, simply because the force of the past proves stronger than the pull of the future, but, as my psychologist friend said, architecture could have an enabling role – one that “de-labels” the criminal and “re-labels” them with a positive identity as responsible parent, skilled motor mechanic, university student, talented artist, horticulturist or whatever it might be. I’m certain that a prison that is thoughtfully designed for the population it holds can make a positive difference to the lives of those who live and work in it. I’m convinced good design need cost no more than bad design, and that persuading prison commissioners and architects to design with hope and human flourishing in mind, rather than security, control, and punishment, is of benefit to society, as well as the people on the receiving end of it.
Prison staff have to have hope, too. If prison architects design high-quality facilities for staff – working spaces where they feel safe and able to exercise their power and discretion appropriately – a prison is more likely to have a happy, motivated workforce who feel invested in and valued as the considerable assets they are.
Yet in many prisons, staff feel the provisions made for them are very much an afterthought. Rest areas are often dark, dingy spaces, too small for the numbers they have to accommodate. More often than not, their windows (if they have windows) are barred, offering staff no respite from the environment and no opportunity to “tune out” of the prison culture. At three recently built prisons in England and Wales, the architects somehow forgot to even give staff a canteen.
How might officers respond differently to the people in their charge if prisons had a feeling of community and care for everyone who occupied them? What if prisons were not like Plato’s cave, with inmates cut off from reality, consigned to watching shadows on the wall? What if prisons were places of light and enlightenment? Could they follow the example of two of the exemplars I always show to the prison architects I work with – Maggie’s Centres and the Little Scandinavia Unit at SCI Chester in Pennsylvania – and become places that communicate warmth and peace? What about love?
Love is what Rev Steve Chalke, the charismatic CEO of the charity Oasis, wants to show children who commit serious crimes. He’s behind a new secure school in Kent. Oasis Restore, as it’ll be known, replaces Medway, a privately operated secure training centre that shut down after a series of scandals involving bullying and abuse. The crisis at the old facility came to a head when an undercover journalist for the BBC programme Panorama posed as a custody officer and filmed secret footage of boys aged 15 and 16 being violently mistreated by staff. Between January 2004 and June 2005, 1,818 child injuries were recorded at the centre as a result of officers using dangerous restraint techniques. Chalke told me he wanted the new secure school to carry no tainted association with the previous private sector-run centre – an ambition he admitted is not helped by the fact that Oasis has inherited the buildings and site of the notorious Medway, and is overlooked by Cookham Wood, a young offender institution that was issued an “urgent notification” in April 2023 after the prisons inspector found that a third of the children held there are in solitary confinement for up to 23-and-a-half hours a day with no access to a shower or fresh air.
Oasis aims to create a completely different kind of secure environment for young people aged 12 to 18. Chalke and his team told me they wanted to try something radically different, so I accepted their invitation to help redesign the accommodation’s interiors to make them feel more like a home than a prison. The facility opened in August 2024, three years later than originally planned. Delays were caused by spiralling costs – from £4.9m to £44m – after its design was revised. I don’t think I was responsible for this uplift, but there is no one involved in the establishment of Oasis Restore who doesn’t believe so much more would have been possible if they’d built the school from scratch. Trying to design humanity in the shell of a facility haunted by the spectre of abuse and violence was never going to be an easy task, however much money was thrown at it.
The children will live together in small units. As far as they can, the Oasis team designed the school to be creative, inspiring and playful. They had a strong vision of how it would look, but wanted to “leave some blank pages”, as the director, Andrew Willetts put it, so the young residents can put their own mark on it. Any graffiti found indoors will be cleaned off immediately, but there will be an outdoor wall for the children to use, as long as they don’t include depictions of weapons or gang iconography. Where possible, everything will be tailor-made for the children living there. They will be seen as individuals, not a homogenous mass.
It remains to be seen how Oasis will fare. I wish them all the luck, because the youth justice system desperately needs the kind of root-and-branch transformation they are promising. Staff at the recently closed Cookham Wood were reported to be exhausted from all the chaos and violence. Yet there were 23 senior managers for just 77 boys. It cost twice as much to keep a child in there as it would to send them to Eton.
Against this backdrop, Oasis Restore’s small team of highly experienced and visionary managers deserve our support. If just one unfortunate incident occurs, the secure school experiment might be condemned as too liberal and abandoned in favour of a return to the institutional brutality of secure training centres. On the other hand, if Oasis Restore succeeds, the Ministry of Justice may take it as a green light to build further secure schools, or more likely convert existing, unsuitable institutions. In turn, greater numbers of children may be sentenced to custody to fill these new establishments.
At Oasis Restore, the pushback to return to a secure training centre model has already begun. In August 2022, I received an email from the director asking if he could discuss “garden solutions” with me. I was puzzled. What could I possibly contribute to the planting scheme? It turned out the problem was much greater than the choice of flowerbeds.
Outside the accommodation buildings, Oasis planned two large green areas. Ofsted told them they must divide these spaces into 12 small gardens, so the children could be kept apart from each other. And then they wanted high steel fences erected around each garden. Willetts was exasperated by this plan to construct 12 prisons within a prison. It was depressing to hear that Ofsted – advised by an architect who’d done previous work in the adult custody sector – were being so unimaginative and dogmatic. Willetts wanted to know if I had any research evidence to show that fences were a bad idea. If they had to have barriers demarcating the gardens, was there something better than a 14ft-high steel fence?
I wrote a letter to support Willetts’s resistance, providing evidence from the adult prison estate to the effect that more green space results in less self-harm and fewer incidents of violent assault. Barriers of any kind, I argued, would diminish the therapeutic potential of the gardens. What’s more, statistics from young offender institutions show that security measures don’t work. When young people are treated as troublemakers, they tend to live up to the label. With its low student-to-staff ratio, the approach at Oasis was intended to be different. Safety would rely more on “dynamic security” – staff developing strong relationships with the young people to create a sense of community – than on traditional methods such as CCTV and locked gates. Hardening the environment with steel fencing would perpetuate divisions and send entirely the wrong message.
Hydebank Wood in Northern Ireland is a former YOI that rebranded as a “secure college”, and the only establishment in the UK that operates in ways close to Oasis’s vision. Here, the landscape is an important element of the site; the last time I visited, there were several goats on the large expanses of grass. The boys at Hydebank Wood garden and cultivate plants, and the open spaces contribute to positive thinking and responsible actions. Rather than attempts to over-securitise the site in anticipation of problems that may never arise, there are sensible strategies in place to deal with isolated events.
Introducing over-engineered “solutions” such as fencing would threaten to create the problems it seeks to avoid. “It would be much better,” I wrote, “to have strategies to respond to the small percentage of young people who may seek to test the boundaries – as I know you and your team already have.”
A few weeks later, I received an email saying there was to be no fence.
The Labour government has promised to deliver sweeping reform to our prison system. Given that every prisoner costs the taxpayer around £50,000 a year, and the UK prison population stands at almost 98,000, we might ask why no politician is brave enough to initiate a public discussion about what we might spend that money on if we weren’t pouring it into the carceral abyss.
Let’s dare to imagine the potential benefits of taking prison population numbers back to 44,500, the level they were in 1993, when home secretary Michael Howard declared that “prison works”. We could invest in more and better schools and hospitals, more libraries and public parks. Spaces that educate, heal and give hope, rather than diminish, brutalise and harm.
This is an edited extract from An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the Prison, Restoring a House, Rebuilding Myself, published by Scribe on 26 September and available at guardianbookshop.com
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