The UK authorities has taken pressing motion to deal with the jail capability disaster, asserting early launch for a number of thousand non-violent offenders.
For years, politicians of all stripes have used prisons and incarceration as a populist trigger to achieve votes. The result’s an overstretched, overcrowded jail system that’s dangerous for prisoners, jail workers and communities.
Round 20% of prisoners in England and Wales are held in prisons constructed in the course of the Victorian period, the place residing situations are objectively worse than of their newer counterparts. Restricted residing areas, poor in-cell sanitation, no in-cell know-how, unreliable infrastructure, and fewer alternatives for work and training due to a scarcity of appropriate areas, are all dangerous sufficient when a jail is at regular capability. However some Nineteenth-century prisons are working at over 150% capability – the worst being HMP Durham at 169% and HMP Leeds at 172%.
I’ve spent my profession researching prisons and serving to to design them to be rehabilitative. We will do a lot, a lot better. As I focus on in my forthcoming ebook, the efforts to construct prisons for each punishment and rehabilitation (two incompatible ideas) have failed.
Prisons usually price at the least £250 million to construct, however with most of this going to safety and little consideration of pleasing aesthetics, the buildings themselves look bland and low cost.
Prisons within the UK would really feel extra civilised if we adopted lots of our European neighbours’ lead in utilizing extra wooden and glass of their development, and spent simply 1% of the development price range on artwork and sculpture.
Politicians have tried to move off the overcrowding issues by commissioning large prisons that maintain 1000’s of inmates. In 1961, jail design skilled Leslie Fairweather wrote that the scale of a constructing will decide the standard of relationships to a exceptional diploma.
“These relationships is not going to develop healthily in enormous, impersonal blocks of cells the place the person is dwarfed by the overwhelming dimension of the construction”, he mentioned at a time when a jail holding 400 individuals was thought-about very giant.
At the moment, new prisons holding round 1,700 inmates are the norm in England and Wales. HMP Berwyn has capability for two,106 males, making it the most important jail within the UK.
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Dangerous design breeds violence in sterile megaprisons
Measurement isn’t the one situation. I’ve seen many a very good jail design thwarted as a result of it was designed for one objective and used for a completely completely different one. One pressing drawback is the variety of individuals ready to be sentenced or convicted. These on remand needs to be held individually from those that are convicted, however the pressures on the system imply that unsentenced prisoners typically share a cell with a convicted offender.
Inadequate numbers of workers imply that even well-designed, progressive-minded prisons find yourself counting on locking prisoners up for extra hours every day. The prolonged lockdowns of 2020 have turn out to be the norm in lots of prisons as a result of there merely aren’t sufficient skilled officers to escort prisoners to work or training.
Constructing higher prisons
The brand new authorities has appointed a prisons minister with a progressive view – James Timpson has mentioned that solely one-third of the jail inhabitants needs to be locked up. Now that he has a mandate to introduce sweeping reform, will he put his cash the place his mouth is?
May we drastically cut back our jail inhabitants, as some international locations have, shut down the ageing and costly Victorian jail property, and construct new prisons that aren’t merely fit-for-purpose, however are civilised and humane locations – imaginatively designed, stunning, even?
I’d love Timpson to go to the brand new girls’s jail in Limerick, Eire, which opened its doorways in October 2023.
I consulted on the design, infusing the plans with an structure of hope that chimes with the brand new authorities’s rhetoric of optimism. Limerick’s mannequin of incarceration relies on rehabilitation and private progress, not punishment and pointless captivity.
With a lightweight, vivid, open reception space, expansive residing areas, and no bars on home windows which look out onto a pleasing backyard, the design for the brand new 54-bed facility is a world away from the outdated Limerick jail, inbuilt 1821. There, girls have been held in dank, catacomb-like cells and exercised in a small concrete yard.
Shortly earlier than the brand new jail opened, among the girls who would quickly be re-housed there have been taken from the outdated jail to see it. A few of them burst into tears, overwhelmed on the sheer niceness of all of it.
Division of Justice|Louise Brangan, CC BY-NC-ND
My analysis has made an affect on the structure of incarceration within the UK too – although with considerably blended outcomes.
Within the early phases of its conception, I suggested on the inside of HMP Berwyn. However the Ministry of Justice’s dedication to “worth engineering” (doing every thing – besides safety – as cheaply as doable) resulted in a facility with all of the appeal of a warehouse.
In opposition to my recommendation, the cells are shared by two males. The principle priorities for cell design have been to make use of both indestructible or replaceable supplies, and create areas with no ligature factors during which prisoners can hurt themselves or others. The result’s rooms that may design out suicide however could improve suicidal emotions. As the primary governor of Berwyn remarked: “We promised heaven, however we didn’t construct the staircase.”
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New ‘therapeutic’ jail in Eire factors to lengthy historical past of progressive penal reform
Our “dependancy” to sentencing and punishment, as Timpson has put it, comes at monumental price to the general public purse. In crude phrases, each prisoner prices the taxpayer round £30,000 or extra a 12 months. I’ve typically questioned why no politician is courageous sufficient to provoke a public dialogue about what we would spend the cash on if we weren’t pouring it into the carceral abyss.
It might go to direct help providers to divert girls from jail and supply safe lodging for them after they go away custody, in amenities just like the aptly-named Hope Road.
However let’s dare to think about the extra potential advantages. Extra and higher faculties and hospitals, extra libraries and public parks. Areas that nourish, educate, and heal, somewhat than diminish, infantilise and hurt.
