Good design matters

A brilliant read is An Architecture of Hope by Yvonne Jewkes, criminologist and a very decent and forward-thinking human given her memoir.

I recommend it being added to people’s own reading lists as it portrays a decent life of love, loss, grief, work, possibilities and proving that challenge to convention(s) can and really does help improve many things. Things that are very often compartmentalised (to the detriment of individuals and communities) and left to many different (and often unnecessary) sections of state, justice and society and seemingly and endlessly treated to a metaphorical sticking plaster to appease an out-dated political system (and its many characters) and appear relevant and efficient in the short-term at the expense of real, meaningful and long-term change that will likely end up meaning their own role is defunct . . . so maybe that’s why things don’t really change for societies?

Anyway, enough of my words, here are some from the author that may help compel you to read their book . . .

Thought-provoking art aside, 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 their families are okay, and that they 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 design desistance from crime, 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, asking rhetorically, ‘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, horticulturalist, or whatever it might be. I’m certain that a prison that is thoughtfully designed for the population it holds (not for some future, imagined population of very serious offenders who require much higher levels of security, as is currently the policy) 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. Charles Jencks said of Maggie‘s, ‘In a way, the carers are more important than the patients. Because if the carers are cared for, they turn up, they enjoy it and you create this virtuous circle, this mood in a Maggie’s Centre which is quite amazing. Architecture helps do that because it looks after the carers.’ 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 no opportunity to ‘tune out’ of the prison culture. At the three most 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 Maggie’s Centres and the Little Scandinavia Unit at SCI Chester and become places that communicate warmth and peace? What about love?

Those words hopefully add to the important conversations about wider and deeper societal changes (maybe, as I felt throughout the book, inferring certainly, that the end of neoliberalism needs to happen as a starting point to achieve real societal change); as an apparently civilised society we do and should be making more efforts to rethink how many a service and institution, whether state-run or market-led, needs to be reinvented and change the electoral processes – including introducing proportional representation and maybe even disallowing political parties, but not (small) groups, contrasting views and opinions at the expense of collective issues and in no way being autocratic or dictatorial in how power is exercised as it should be always for a more egalitarian and accountable means, to make a better ‘web’ of openness and effectiveness on many an issue, like justice and prisons – and really start devolving some power from Westminster (and its associated hegemonies); supported by strong and effective, but adaptable where relevant and necessary, regional setups (and maybe some ‘big’ local variants to assist) that empower and nurture, alongside good frameworks of regulation (with central guidance where appropriate) and fair means so as confident and pertinent involvement and interest in civic life and community will happen.

Here are some more words from the book to help convince you to give it a go . . .

The problem with any sort of prison reform is that it legitimises the idea of the prison. This is a thorny issue that frequently overshadows my work, not least because the question of whether we should be improving conditions or dismantling the whole system, including maximum-security facilities, is one that divides criminologists.

I’m not an abolitionist, but I sometimes say I have abolitionist leanings, which I guess is a bit like being a vegetarian who is partial to the occasional bacon sandwich. I just can’t buy into abolitionism wholesale. I think some people need to be in prison, and some deserve to lose their freedom, or to be removed from (often domestic) situations where they are making life unbearable for their victims. But I also believe prisons are a statement of failure, and that our deep cultural attachment to incarceration is a woeful admission of defeat.

Prisons are also symptomatic of racist social structures and systems. By the 1980s, Black people made up half of the US prison population, compared with only 12 per cent of the general US population. On average, a Black person was seven times more likely to be imprisoned than a white person. There are good reasons why calls for abolition in the United States have come mainly from Black political prisoners, scholars, and activists, then. The global prison-industrial complex – a term that describes the use by government and industry of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems – has been likened, and linked, to slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Moreover, the growth of imprisonment in the 20th century as a means of controlling opponents to colonial and political power meant that the prison was imported into countries in Africa and Asia that had never had a tradition of confining people. Their traditions of punishment were informed by local religious, historical, cultural, and economic values. In some societies, the authority to punish rested with political or spiritual leaders; in others, the victim’s family or larger community might determine the penalty. The use of incarceration as punishment was rare in pre-colonial societies.

The global expansion of prisons means prison populations continue to rise at a frightening pace, and in many Western nations it is still ethnic and cultural minorities who are disproportionately swept up in the carceral net. In the UK between 1993 and 2003, the white prison population increased by 48 per cent; Asian prisoners by 73 per cent; and Black prisoners by 138 per cent. Yet, the commitment to privatisation and profit-driven punishment, together with a rabid penal populism driven by right-wing media, ensures that few politicians are going to voice disquiet about the inexorable damage we are doing to individuals, families, and whole swathes of society by using prisons as the default way of dealing with people who we criminalise.

Back when I was doing my PhD, there were 8.75 million people held in prisons around the world. Now that number is approaching 11.5 million. Prison populations are usually expressed as a number in relation to the general population to allow for meaningful comparisons between nations. So, in England and Wales, for example, we imprison 31 people per 100,000 of the wider population. Australia’s figure is 167; New Zealand’s 164; Norway’s is 56. The US has the dubious distinction of heading the league table, with an astonishing 629 prisoners per 100,000 of the population - over 2 million incarcerated people. Or, to put it another way, the US has less than 2 per cent of the world’s population, but close to 20 per cent of the world’s prisoners.

In contrast

. . . to the political leanings of the passages I’m showing in this article there are plenty of parts where the author talks about her personal experiences, passions and perspectives to greatly help its narrative and the understanding, even appreciation, of the efforts she has made and endured for better things.