Prison Architecture: rehabilitation and humane design with Yvonne Jewkes, Professor of Criminology at University of Bath

Discover the transformative power of prison architecture in this episode of Built Environment Matters. Join Professor Yvonne Jewkes, a leading criminologist from the University of Bath, as she explores how innovative design can shift prisons from spaces of confinement to hubs of rehabilitation. Hosted by Bryden Wood Architecture Director, Steven Tilkin, this episode delves into the intersection of architecture and criminology, revealing the societal impacts of thoughtful design on inmate behavior, rehabilitation, and overall prison dynamics.

Key topics include the ethical challenges of prison design, sustainable building principles inspired by Passivhaus, and the role of architecture in promoting dignity and reducing re-offending rates. Tune in to learn how interdisciplinary approaches can reshape correctional facilities for a more humane and sustainable future.

Perfect for architects, criminologists, and anyone passionate about the intersection of design and social justice. Listen now!

To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone. Welcome again to another episode of our podcast, Built Environment Matters. I'm Steven Tilken, Architectural Director at Bryden Wood, and today we are joined by Yvonne Jewkes. Yvonne is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath. She teaches both Criminology and Architecture students, and has worked as an expert consultant on numerous prison design and build projects and prison refurbishments around the world. Yvonne has won two prestigious prizes for her work on prison architecture and design, and how they can help to rehabilitate rather than punish. The ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for Societal Impact in 2020. and the Marbeck Research Society's President's Medal 2021. Yvonne has published extensively on the potential of architecture to rehabilitate rather than punish, and she's currently writing a non academic book about her personal experiences of researching prison architecture for a general audience. She's also writing an article about her work on the design of the new Limerick women's prison for the Architects Journal. Hi Yvonne, welcome to our podcast. It's great to have you. It's very nice to be here, thank you. You had a very distinguished career and your work on criminology and prison architecture is internationally important. Could we start by asking why you became interested in criminology in the first place? Yeah, I came to criminology quite late, actually. I did an MA in Mass Communications Research, and during that Masters, I became interested in audience studies, which basically found that television viewing is gendered, and that by controlling the TV, the dominant social group, men, or when they're not there, male children, restricted access to less powerful members of the household, women and girls. Looking back, I realise that these studies of TV viewing actually had quite a lot to tell us about space and how space underpins claims to power. So, the research showed that men enjoyed uninterrupted access to the television and would watch TV from a favourite armchair in the main living room, you know, the main point of relaxation in the home. They'd have the remote control to hand on the side of daddy's armchair and they determined the conditions under which television was watched. So some programmes would have to be watched in absolute silence. Other programmes, they would permit enthusiastic participation, for example and women tended to watch TV. This was sort of back in the late eighties, early nineties, these studies were carried out. They found that women tended to watch TV in a much more haphazard and distracted fashion, frequently combining the viewing of their favourite programmes with attending to the needs of other family members. So the typical scenario was that the woman would be in the kitchen, cooking everyone's tea, watching their favourite soap opera on a grainy plate. black and white portable TV screen. And in contrast to their husbands, women were still at work in the domestic sphere, even if they had paid employment outside the home. So all this got me thinking about what would happen in an all male environment, a prison, for example, would some lower status men effectively be feminised, for want of a better word, and have their viewing preferences quashed by the more alpha males in the group. I'd heard anecdotally that communal TV rooms in jails were flashpoints for violence. They became violent when prisoners disagreed over which channel was watched because obviously you couldn't have a separate TV room with, you know, all different channels on. So some negotiation had to go on. And I'd heard that prisoners would literally be in the TV room with their backs to the walls and I found all that very interesting. So most TV rooms in prisons had metal chairs, bolted to the floor so they couldn't be picked up and used to crack anyone over the head with. And I was kind of interested in power, in the ways that power flows through prisons and how it's mediated in these ways. By the time I started my PhD, in cell television was being introduced. Association spaces were being phased out, precisely for the reasons that they could become very violent and ignite tensions. So my PhD actually ended up being about in cell television, and other media. And although a lot of prison officers initially expressed opposition to prisoners having personal television sets in their cells, they soon came around to the idea because it meant that prison regimes that were quieter, more ordered, less violent. Inmates could be locked up for longer periods and they didn't mind because they now had an electronic babysitter, as the Governor put it. So, television is now a powerful incentive to good behaviour because If a prisoner is disruptive or uncompliant in any way, they can have their TV set taken off them, and that's a very powerful sort of bargaining chip. An in cell TV was effectively used as a sweetener, I guess. So all this has a bearing on the architecture of prisons as well, because prisoners spend more time in cell, less time on the landings or in social spaces, and yet we seem to be value engineering the cell to a point where it becomes a prison. the antithesis of the kind of space where we would all ideally like to watch television at home. This was a very interesting route into prison design. Very surprising. I didn't expect you to have ended up in prison design, starting from studying families, watching television. Very interesting. So you said then you sort of moved on from media related studies and completely started focusing on, on prison architecture. Was there like a specific event or prison that needed to be designed? What was then the key, a moment that you decided to completely focus on prisons and prison architecture? I'm not absolutely sure. I've got a lousy memory and I wish I could remember that light bulb moment that I had. But I can't. I do remember that I was asked to write a book chapter about prison architecture and it was on the basis of very little knowledge or experience. But I thought, hmm, that sounds interesting. I'll do that. And that was in about, 2006 that I was asked to do that. I think it was published in 2008. But I think that when I started going into prisons for the first time, back as a PhD student, there were two things that really surprised me. I was pleasantly surprised that prisoners were so normal and so keen to speak to me. Any ideas that I'd had about people in prison being fundamentally different to people that I might meet in any other sphere of my life were quickly dispelled. A lot of the men that I was interviewing, they were all men at the time, were long termers convicted of offences like armed robbery, bank robberies, that kind of thing, some dating back to the 1960s and 70s. And I don't want to over romanticise offenders or be unduly nostalgic about how prisons were different back then than they were. But I used to return to work at my university, often reflecting that I'd had more interesting conversations with the men in prison than I did with some of my university colleagues. So, you know, many of the prisoners that I spoke to, as I say, they were long termers, they had a lot of time on their hands. They were highly intelligent, avid readers, deep thinkers. So conversations would often take a kind of literary turn or a philosophical turn. So that was all a pleasant surprise to me. But the second surprise was just how horrible prison environments are. All the cinematic stereotypes that I had in my head about the hostile architecture of prisons, and people being locked up in, you know, dark, dingy, cold cells with thick bars on the windows, masses of grey concrete, razor wire everywhere, pokey exercise yards covered in steel mesh so that you could hardly see the sky through. You know, that feeling of being kind of caged. All of that was a shock to me and it seemed so antithetical to the idea of rehabilitation or even being human, actually. And even though I wasn't researching the built environment, it made a big impact on me, and it sort of chimed with a broader interest that I think I've always had in architecture and design. I've always been acutely aware of the impact that architecture has on me, on my emotional well being and, and my mental health and so on. So you know, it was a confluence of things that just came together at the right time. Yeah. It's very interesting to hear your experience and stuff, and that was quite recent in the way that you learned all that, because you mentioned 2006 and it's also very recognisable because I remember when we first started working on the new prison design with MOJ. I had these kinds of experiences as well that you just mentioned. Prisoners were much more normal people than you expect and the conversations that we had because we visited prisoners was very enlightening and was very useful. Our view really changed about prisons and prison design and that's where we also for the first time I think learned what prisons are actually for because sort of a common view it's sort of just to be our own place and to punish you for what you've done but could you may be explain what fundamentally is the purpose of a prison and how architecture plays a fundamental role in making a prison successful. Yeah, sure. I mean, I would say just before I do that, that hearing your experience is really interesting and important to me, and it really underlines what I always say on prison commissions that I work on around the world, but it still very rarely happens, is that You guys, you know, the people who are the architects designing new prisons, really would benefit from meeting prisoners and speaking to prisoners. You know, they are the end users of the spaces that you create. And it just still doesn't happen enough. So, yeah, I think it's worth remembering that. Yeah, and I remember they were very eloquent as well. That's what surprised me, they were sort of very eloquent and they really knew what mattered and they were able to express it. So, to the extent that I thought, you how did these people end up in here because they would actually function very well in society, of course, there's backgrounds that you probably don't know about. Yeah, I remember talking to an architect I worked with in Australia, and I asked him if he ever got to meet and chat to any prisoners or even prison staff. And he said, no, the men in suits get twitchy, you know, they get very nervous. He, he always tries when he's shown around a prison, you know, he tries to kind of make a detour and talk to the prisoners and, and officers, but it's sort of frowned on, you know, he's discouraged from doing so. So I, I really think that's something that has to change, but going back to your question, the purpose of prison is contested. In this country, we use prisons to punish, primarily but also to communicate retribution on the part of society, and to deter people from committing future offences. So, that's why early prisons in the 19th century were designed to resemble gothic palaces or medieval castles you know, these prisons made a flamboyant statement about the solemnity and power of the state. So the architecture was purposefully formidable. The message written into it was one of deterrence. It was a warning to the community, you know, behave yourselves or you'll end up behind these monstrous walls. And of course, early 19th century prisons were designed to enforce the separate system, where prisoners were forcibly kept separate, kept apart at all times so they were held alone in separate cells where they would work, sleep, and take their meals, and pray. The only time they were permitted to leave their cells was to attend chapel when their faces would be masked or for exercise and often they would be made to exercise in separate yards. So a very punitive and inhumane regime was implemented through architecture and in the 19th century its effects could be measured by the high numbers of prisoners who, who went insane and committed suicide. So if we try to take a more enlightened view now in the 2020s and design prisons to rehabilitate, which itself is a hugely problematic statements to make. I think architecture can certainly create an environment that emulates normal living and working conditions as far as possible. There's an old adage that people go to prison as punishment, not for punishment. So the loss of liberty is everything. You know, they're going to prison as the punishment, not for further punishment. And some countries in Europe have this principle enshrined in law, so their prisons tend to be architecturally more humane, and more normal, more progressive than ours. And we might look at those countries re offending rates, which often tend to be lower than our own, as evidence that there is a link between progressive design and a desire not to, to re offend. But it's complicated. It's It's impossible to isolate architecture from all the other things that impact on someone's life, both in prison and pre prison, and so that's why they stop offending. But I think, you know, good architecture, imaginative design, and humane principles are about more than just causal effect. They symbolise a more enlightened attitude on the part of society, and I think that's important. If the mark of a civilisation can be gauged by entering its prisons, you'd have to conclude that we're not very civilised at all. You know, it's very interesting to hear the history of Victorian prisons. I mean, I was fascinated by that as well when I was reading all that when we were working original prison design and although it seems far away, I think those concepts were so much ingrained into the typologies. That from the 19th century, that actually was still used in the 20th century. That was quite difficult for designers sometimes, I think, to step away from them because there was so much ingrained that it was very difficult to understand why it was done and why it needs to be different. So with that in mind, what do you think are now the most important elements of prison architecture? What should we prioritise? What's the most important thing? Or is there like a number of elements that need to work together with regard to architecture in prisons? Yeah, I don't think you can isolate prison spaces. You have to look at the prison in a holistic sense, I guess. And it's a, another massive question. But I do think that when it comes to channeling, not only kind of financial resources, but also, creativity and imagination, I think there are probably three key spaces that I would point to where we could be doing better. I think the first is the cell. It's the only private space a prisoner has, and I think it should be private. Prisoners shouldn't have to share a cell unless they choose to. Sometimes there are good reasons, if someone's a suicide risk, to have someone of their choosing as a cellmate to sort of buddy up with them can be beneficial, but generally cell design is overwhelmingly determined by security and cost constraints, with the aesthetics of homeliness or domesticity coming a long way behind, if considered at all, and I think this is a problem. The main priorities now are to use indestructible materials. and create spaces with no ligature points in which prisoners can harm themselves or others. And I think this tends to lead to very anodyne rooms that might design out suicide, but possibly increase suicide ideation. And I have no data on this. I've never researched the link between design and suicide or suicidal feelings, but I have stood in, and as yet, unoccupied two bed cell in a recently constructed prison in the UK, a couple of months after it opened. And as I stood there looking around at all the cheap ply and plastic furniture and staring through the vertically barred window at an identical building straight opposite, I imagined that If I was confined in that space with another person because it was double bunked, I might feel suicidal. You know, it was a pretty bleak and impoverished space. So, you know, I think I always say to architects, let's imagine prison cells more like high end student halls of residence and design the rooms accordingly. I think secondly, reception is really important. It sets the tone, both for prisoners and for visitors. So in recent prison builds, for example, in this country, there's been a move towards designing in waiting rooms for prisoners in reception rather than holding cells, so rooms with sofas, more comfortable television to watch, that kind of thing. Reception has had very good medical facilities attached to it, which I think is really important. There have been coffee and tea making facilities so that prison staff can welcome prisoners. I know this is very controversial in some ways, but you know, it has all sorts of benefits both for, for prisoners and staff for prison officers to be able to welcome prisoners and ask them if they'd like a hot drink and a sandwich. You know, very often they've been transported many, many miles in those hideous prison escort vehicles, which are totally inhumane so things like that make a real difference. And I think in terms of visitors receptions, you know, visitors shouldn't be kept waiting unduly, and they should also feel welcomed, not intimidated. And I think that's particularly important for families, for children of prisoners. I've been through many reception areas and tried to imagine what they would be like through the eyes of a young child. And You know, they're pretty frightening places for an experienced prison researcher like myself, you know, trying to imagine what it must be like for an eight year old going to visit their mother or father in prison. It's a pretty salutary experience. And I think thirdly, following on from that, prison visiting rooms could be designed with more imagination, more empathy, and again, especially with children in mind. Actually, you and I were part of a group that visited a Victorian prison recently, and I thought the visits were all there. Pretty good. You know, the chairs look quite comfortable. They weren't bolted to the floor, as they so often are. Yes, yes, yes. And there was a serving hatch through which a real person could serve coffee and tea and cake and so on, rather than the vending machines that you so often get. And, and lots of soft play areas for children. You know, I thought, as these things go, that was pretty good. But again, you know, I think we just need to think a little bit more expansively. You know, what about older children, for example, who are going to visit parents in prison? How do we cater for them? So, yeah, I think those are the three areas that I think, There's a lot of room for improvement and where the most gains could be made, really. Yes. Yes. It's interesting that you say, yeah, it is intimidating. And it's a funny in a way that even for us, when we visit professionally, that you still feel a bit stressed, a bit intimidated, although you're there on a completely professional basis. So I can imagine what it is for someone that's really visiting a family member or a child. So that really sort of brought home for me the message, how important all those things were. He also mentioned that it's not about architecture alone, but, but about the whole system that it's about the people as well. I think that was one of our major learnings when we worked on the prison design. I mean, it all sounds very obvious now, but I think architects sometimes maybe are a bit naive and hope that just to share good design, good layouts and good materials and good colours. They somehow are going to transform these people. But working very closely with the MOJ staff, we really learned all the kinds of things that were going on in the prison and that there's a lot of people working there that ultimately help rehabilitated people so we had this sort of like strapline that summarises this. It's not the prison as such that rehabilitates people, it's people that rehabilitate people. And I think also you tend to stress a lot of the importance of staff and making sure staff is happy and maybe if you can explain a bit more exactly how staff help in the rehabilitation process, because I think a lot of people who don't know about prisons think about staff just as guards and as probably very sort of cynical, sadistical people like in the movies, but it is quite different in reality, isn't it? It is. Criminologists call this dynamic security. So interpersonal interactions actually make for more secure prisons so it's about personal relationships. It's about staff and prisoners getting to know each other and a level of rapport and trust being built between them. And I think that's not only really important for prisoners to feel that they have people who are looking after them and looking after their, their interests. But it's also crucial for staff to feel like a valued professional workforce, and I do talk about this a lot because I think it's really important. I remember reading a study from Denmark a few years ago, which showed that when staff are encouraged to really get involved with activities with prisoners, whether that's five a side football, or Tai Chi in the mornings, you know, where prisoners and staff do Tai Chi together, whether it's learning together, you know, any kind of mutual activity with mutual goals staff tend to have much lower rates of sickness and absenteeism, and they feel more valued, and they enjoy their jobs more. So it's a kind of win win situation, so I think we really need to get away from the sense of them and us when it comes to staff and prisoners and through training and a sort of shared vision, try and make staff feel as if they're an integral part of the rehabilitation journey for prisoners and it, you know, it's very difficult to do, but I think, you know, again, to a large extent it can be achieved architecturally. So designing spaces where there are day routes, for example, where prisoners and staff can just, you know, chat to each other or play board games with each other or, you know, just watch TV, watch the football together, you know, why not? That happens in plenty of prisons in Europe. You know, gardens, you know, therapeutic garden where a personal officer can have a one to one meeting with a prisoner. I think all these kinds of things are really important and as I say, I think they're mutually beneficial. I don't think any prison officer wants to be thought of as a turnkey, you know, just someone who locks and unlocks gates. Where's the job satisfaction in that? I think, you know, most people go into the service wanting to make a difference and believing that they can make a difference. And yeah, I think design can play a part in that. So, so there is, there is the design and then even more importantly, the people that work in prisons. But technology plays an important role as well in prison. How can that help a prison function better and how can that help in the rehabilitation journey? Well, I think technology is a vital component of normality and of rehabilitation. And again, I know, you know, some might think it's a controversial thing to say, but there are people now leaving prison who were sentenced before we all had smartphones and swipe screen technology, you know, before we used the internet for everything. And we're throwing them back out into a world where they have no conception of how to function in the way that we now all do. So they were last part of the world when you bought bus and train tickets from a person, you know, as opposed to online or from a machine. So I would give every prisoner a personal iPad or an iPad style tablet that they could use to book medical appointments, family visits, legal visits, choose what food they want from the day's menu, order what they want from the prison shop. You know, give them a sense of agency and personal responsibility, because at the moment we infantilise prisoners, we make them very dependent on others, and I think it's really important that we reverse that trend. But I also think, you know, just be civilised about it, you know, allow them to do all the things that we all do on our iPads or our laptops, you know, from reading the newspaper, checking the weather forecast, keeping photos of their children, studying. You know, all these things are not really privileges or luxuries anymore, you know, for most of us, they're just a normal part of life. So I'd give prisoners secure access to the internet so that they can't access sites that they, they shouldn't, but that they can have secure access to most of the sites that, that most of us use every day. And I think as well, in cell phones are essential for prisoners to stay in touch with, with their loved ones. And actually one of the few advantages of the, the pandemic. has been initiating Zoom type calls, you know, purple visits they're called, so that people in prison can see their families even when it's physically not possible to. And I think, you know, that's particularly important for foreign nationals, for example, in our prison system. People whose, you know, families live a long way away so that they can't visit. I don't think online visits should ever be a substitute for real life visits, but I think that they can be a very useful addition. And again, technology is changing the architecture of prisons because space needs to be configured differently in the digital prison. And again, I think it's a, it's a call for more humane, more imaginative, more domestic cell spaces, because if we're going to give people technology that they can have family visits on and in cell telephones, then they want to feel that they're in a kind of relaxed setting and, you know, comfortable to use those technologies in the way that we all would. We worked with you and Dominique Moran, your colleague, on the initial designs , for New Prison, HMP Five Wells in Wellingborough. Could you describe that project and how that project reflects the findings of your research? Yeah, it was a long time ago now. I mean, it was early planning stage that Dominique Moran and I presented research findings to Bryden Wood and the Ministry of Justice. I think it was about six years ago, but it actually feels like longer. I've been to a lot of prisons since then. I think my mission was to try and get everyone thinking about prisons and the people who go to prison differently. And I think we were advocating a more humane approach, suggesting that prisons should be designed along similar lines to other types of civic building. I expect we talked a lot about the importance of green space and, you know, Bryden Wood were very keen to incorporate academic research into the, the master planning. I remember that you and your colleague Jaimie arrived at one meeting with a pile of academic textbooks under your arms, including some that Dominique and I had written, which was, which was very nice to see. So that was in the very early days, and I've seen a few images of HMP Five Wells, but just what's been in the newspapers and on Twitter, basically. The images show bright colour palettes, glazed walls, views of green space and blue space. I think there are views overlooking the River Nene. And I saw on Kier's website that they say that the built environment is conducive to rehabilitation. So, although it's a very large prison. They've made some efforts to make big feel small, with each landing able to be split into three, so each spur holds 20 men, basically, I believe. There's an association room for prisoners to use, and the visitor's hall has been designed to be open and light and to instill a sense of normality for those visiting. And I think a lot of those ideas came from the presentations that Dominique Moran and I did at the MOJ. But what I'm increasingly coming to realise is that that research project, which ran from 2014 to 2017, and I should say it was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the SRC, which is our main academic funding body, that research project had a real impact on how we design prisons now in the UK and Ireland, and also further afield in Australia and New Zealand, for example. And I think the conversation has changed as a result of that research. Early on at the MOJ, if you remember, we were having discussions about horizontal bars or vertical bars on windows. And I remember an early conversation where Dominique and I were trying to persuade the MOJ that there shouldn't be any bars on windows. And the conclusion at the time was that you could have horizontal bars for women and children in custody, but for adult men, the bars had to be vertical because they had to signify punishment. You know, that was seen as symbolically important. And now, thanks to that research and Bryden Wood's involvement and, and belief in it the new prisons at Wellingborough and Glen Parva won't have bars on the windows at all for the first time in English penal history. And I think we can be proud of that. I think that is a small but really significant achievement. I do need to emphasise, you know, I am a criminologist and I do believe that we should be decreasing the prison population, not building new prisons. Prisons are a statement of failure and we shouldn't be trying to build our way out of the crisis of overcrowding. We should be looking at sentencing policies and alternatives to prison. And I think, you know, it's really important that I say that because there are elements of my work that are a bit of an ethical minefield for me, actually. But yeah, you know, these prisons that are currently being built, I think that. Dominique and my research and Bryden Wood's involvement in the early stages have really changed the conversation and there are quite significant incremental improvements being made to the design of prisons. And I think it's important, not only for the quality of life benefits that they'll bring to people in prison, including staff, but also for what they say about us as a society, you know, what they say about our attitudes to people who go to prison. Yeah and although you sort of mentioned some sort of disappointing first meetings with, with MOJ and discussions about what prisons should be like, I, I think I remember later on when we were talking to MOJ in the context of the, the Prison Estate Transformation Programme, I think you were quite pleasantly surprised and positive about that because I seem to remember that Dominique and you were saying, Oh, this is really interesting, we feel that MOJ is opening up. They're making more space for innovative design in prisons so I would say that apart from the research and the design that we did, that, that MOJ with this attitude as a client played an important role as well, in a way to be open to all this kind of thinking and to make it possible for us to make those changes so maybe it's, what would you recommend to governments or some future clients that need to build prisons about having the right, I guess, open attitude or be ready to sort of start like a fundamental dialogue about prison research and prison design. Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right, Steven, but you know, there were lots of smart people and compassionate people working in the Ministry of Justice, some very experienced people. But they are constantly kind of torn between what they know and what they're open to hearing from evidence based research from people like myself and Westminster, you know, what the politicians are saying and thinking. And, you know, one of the big problems in this country and many other countries is our populist press. You know, the Daily Mail test is the thing that was mentioned almost more than anything else by civil servants. You know, would this pass the Daily Mail test? And, you know, the fact that penal policy is being dictated by a newspaper like The Mail is, you know, I almost have no words for it, actually, but, you know, I do agree with you that there are plenty of people in the Ministry of Justice who would love to do things differently and as I say, I think incremental changes are being made, and I'm very proud of the small part that I've played in that. So when we designed Five Wells, it was actually part of a bigger framework. We, we developed a template design, a standardised design for, for prisons in the UK, and it was built around core principles to be rolled out across the Prison Estate Transformation Programme. You've worked with prison authorities all over the world. Have you found core approaches to prison design to be broadly similar, or are they very different? Is there fundamental differences between different countries? Yeah, I've worked mostly in countries that have broadly similar views to our own or are more progressive. I haven't really worked in countries where, you know, there's been more of a battle to get sort of humane rehabilitative principles embedded into design. And I would say that, yeah, the core approaches are broadly similar in countries that are broadly similar to our own. So the work I've done in Australia, for example, primarily with Guymer Bailey Architects, has a very strong rehabilitative ethos. I think it's a very tall order to hope that buildings can deliver rehabilitation, as you said, as people that make the difference. But I do believe that architecture can shape positive experiences. I think that design can nurture pro social relationships rather than anti social behaviours, for example. I think it can foster good relationships between prisoners and staff. Even just something very small, like designing workstations for staff that are open so that prisoners can approach them and a conversation can be had is important. We did that on the prison that I worked on in Auckland, Maximum Security Prison and, you know, that was a sort of indicator that the core values there are different to our own because the notion that maximum security prisoners in New Zealand are especially violent, is very deeply entrenched in the corrections service over there. So we designed these open workspaces for, for staff so that staff weren't kind of hiding away in little offices and, and, you know, couldn't be approached by prisoners. But then the officers demanded that glass be put up, bulletproof glass, because, you know, as I say, this kind of feeling of their prisoners being very violent is kind of embedded in the culture. So, you know, there's only so much you can do, but yeah, I'd say, on the whole, anglophone countries tend to have broadly similar core values. Yep, so there's a lot of similarities and there's like principles that can be used throughout, but I guess there's also a certain importance of the locality and how important is it for a prison design to reflect its location and its particular situation? You sometimes find that prison designs are transplanted from one country to another, experimental designs that seem to promise a more humane approach, but sometimes they don't translate very well because, you know, it might be a very different operational culture or political climate, or sometimes it's the actual climate, the weather, that's a problem. So I wrote a paper a few years ago with Elizabeth Grant, who's an architectural theorist based in Adelaide. And we write about the folly of Australia copying some American prison designs because the climate, you know, the much higher temperatures in Australia made them totally unsuitable. You know, literally building materials were buckling in the heat or, you know, or melting and the different kinds of operational culture and issues around crowding and so on just made them totally unsuitable. So it's not the case that you can just take a prison design from one country and think, oh, it's working there. You know, we'll try that too. We'll copy it. It's more complicated than that. And when we were working on prison design, you always like working in a real environment and cost always plays an important role. And we always have a lot of cost consultants on board to make sure that we don't design something that's too expensive. But do you think that humane prison necessarily means that it's going to be more expensive or is there a sort of a different relation between how much money you spend on a prison and how humane a prison can be? In a broad sense, I don't think that good design need cost more than the bad design, but it's perhaps a question of diverting money from some things to others. And I think that requires political will and a willingness to invest in architecture that encourages the kind of interpersonal relationships that we've been talking about, rather than expensive, hard security measures. The three areas that I spoke about earlier, I think, the cell and the reception area and visiting space, are worth investing more money in and more imagination in. And I think, you know, I've noticed that the cells in Five Wells, for example, look cheap in all honesty, that space is home for people in prison and I wish more money was being directed at making the cell feel more domestic and just a nicer environment in which spend a lot of time. And in one aspect of the environment, that's often the casualty of budget cuts is the landscaping. I've seen a lot of prison designs around the world that start with really impressive landscaping and you know, there's a lot of research that shows that access to nature. and views of green space are highly beneficial to the health and well being of people in prison, as they are to all of us. But all too often, when money becomes tight and corners get cut, it's the landscaping that's compromised, and I think that's regrettable. One other thing that I'll say is that prisons tend to cost about the same amount of money, I've noticed. About 250 million pounds, and that just seems to be the standard budget. So it's what Five Wells is costing, it's what the last prison built in England and Wales cost, Berwyn, which opened in 2017, and it's also what Halden Prison in Norway costs, and it's Halden that is generally held up around the world, you know, universally proclaimed to be the world's most humane prison. But Berwyn holds 2,106 men. The capacity of Five Wells is 1,680, so there's quite a significant difference there. Halden holds around 250 men, so cost per head or cost per bed varies quite dramatically and that inevitably has an impact on the quality of services, the fixtures and fittings, um, the finishes, the building materials, the landscaping and so on. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's something to really think about. And, you know, Five Wells is going to be a big prison, but it's not as big as Berwyn. And, you know, that is a small step in the right direction, I would say. But, you know, there's a wealth of research that small prisons are. better than large prisons and succeed on the whole range of outcomes and indices. So yeah, we should be doing better. And I think in that sense, a lot of good academic research and evidence really helps in that, in that journey. Because I remember when we were designing the template and which ultimately is built in Five Wells. There was constantly this tension between spend less and save money, but sort of try and achieve all those rehabilitation of objectives. And sometimes these discussions were difficult because it's always very easy to measure how much something is going to cost, but, it's much more difficult to measure the positive effect a design decision can have. So we felt that was difficult, but I think based on all the input that we had from you and also from the staff at MOJ, we found that it was much easier to make the difficult decisions and help the Ministry of Justice make bolder decisions and spend where they need to spend money to make sure they achieve their objectives. So what do you think are the main barriers that still need to be overcome to improve prison design? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think the main barrier is lack of political will, fuelled by what politicians think the public wants. You know, I'd love a politician to be brave enough to initiate a public conversation about how much prisons are costing us, the taxpayers and who goes to prison and why. People need to understand that prisons are full of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. And I would love a national conversation about how we could prevent people from entering the criminal justice system in the first place. What kinds of social and community level support they might benefit from that would ultimately make society safer. And then we could talk about what we might want to spend the 250 million pounds that every prison costs. And of course, that's just the cost to build. There are massive ongoing operational costs to add to that, as well as other kinds of costs to, to families and communities. But instead of building more prisons, why don't we invest the money in the health service and schools or in community resources, libraries, public parks? That's the conversation that I'd like us to be having. Yeah, not just build more, slightly better prisons, but we think it as a whole. So based on your experience, and in a way, sort of the increasingly more enlightened attitude, in a sense, from Ministry of Justice, for example, how positive are you about the future and do you think that we can see even more dramatic positive changes in prison design or the whole approach to prison design or incarceration? I wish I could be more optimistic, but you know, the answer is not very. You know, it's hard to be optimistic when the government have committed to providing 10, 000 new prison places, including 500 new prison beds for women, based on the spurious logic that they're funding more police officers and that naturally equates to more women in prison. I mean, this is pretty horrific. You know, a lot of women in prison are victims of far more serious crimes than they have perpetrated and the collateral damage to their families of women and being in prison in particular is terrible, you know, and it's a bane on society really. I personally believe that we could be letting about 85 percent of, of women in prison out of prison and that we should be doing so. So, you know, it's hard to, to maintain any level of optimism in the current political climate. Prisons are seen as an easy win by the political classes. All the decision making is populist, aimed at keeping the Daily Mail on side, is not informed by evidence or any kind of compassion for the most vulnerable members of society. So, yeah, and I have to say, I think this is a bit of a failing of criminology as well, that criminologists haven't done enough to penetrate political debates and discussions and policy making decisions about prisons. But, yeah, you know, all I can do at the current time is to keep promoting a reformist agenda, I think, although I'm an abolitionist at heart. Okay, thank you. It sounds a bit pessimistic and I understand because I think it's all a very sort of complex matter. But I think what I took from it as an architect maybe is that although those things are very complex, If you want to make a difference as an architect, you really need to engage with the complexity and don't retreat to a sort of narrow view of architecture where you just, you know, design some nice pictures with some nice colours and some green, but you actually think about the wider debate and you engage in the wider debate and try and get to the core principles to inform the design because ultimately the reason why we are architects is because we think the built environment matters and we can, by sort of thinking about it and engaging with academia hopefully we can make a difference and can make better places and ultimately improve society. Yeah, I mean, I think that most of the architects I've met have been quite utopian and, you know, why not? You know, that, that is the only way that reform will happen. But what I would say to architects, two things really, do anything you can to engage with the end users. You know, they're the real stakeholders, you know, the people who will live and work in the spaces that you're creating. And secondly, treat it as an embodied experience. When I worked on Limerick Women's Prison, which is going to open later this year, One of the questions that I asked the architects that were competing for that tender was try and imagine a relative of yours being in the prison that you're designing. You know, what would you design for them that would enable them not only to survive, but to thrive and flourish? And that was a question that the architects had never thought to ask themselves, and it kind of had them reeling in surprise, but again, it changed their mindset. They'd never thought, you know, what if my mother or sister or daughter found themselves in this prison? And honestly, I never leave a prison without thinking, there but for the grace of God, go I or any of us. I think it, you know, it could literally happen to any of us. So yeah, I would say, architects, please design prisons with those thoughts in mind. Thank you for this conversation. It was very nice to talk to you again. And it got me really excited about all the things that we learned when we were designing Five Wells, and hopefully we can work again in the future and make a difference again. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Join us next month for another episode of our podcast Built Environment Matters.