An Architecture of Hope
Reimagining the Prison, Restoring a House, Rebuilding Myself
Yvonne Jewkes
Having read it
★★★★★
Personal, evocative, realistic, eclectic and also quite inspiring in its opinions and perspectives on and around the author’s life and work; referencing real-life examples, like the meetings she has attended as part of her work, alongside rather prophetic, even prescient, quotes from literature and non-fiction titles (that have shaped her and her experiences, too) which all act as a confident balance and reality check that show change can and even does happen.
Many governments assume the public are intolerant of anything which makes imprisonment more humane, and there remains a deeply ingrained belief that prisons must feel like places of hardship and deprivation. It’s thought prison won’t act as a deterrent if it’s in the slightest bit comfortable. No prisoner should find their surroundings so pleasant that, like Smasher Lagru [a character from David McKee’s, Mr Benn], they want to stay, or are tempted to commit further offences to get sent back to custody. But people who think this have never spent a night ‘behind the door’, a term used by prisoners to describe not just their physical predicament but their psychological confinement. To be behind the door is to experience real lockdown – an intense feeling of mental anguish brought on by a lack of choice and autonomy, and exacerbated by ugly, claustrophobic surroundings.
The book also implies, in its own, accessible way, how good design really can and does lead to better attitudes, approaches and means and methods to and for things across society (even if it is only to 80 per cent!) and, ultimately, saves money in the long-term.
A good passage
The language of trauma-informed practice can also trap traumatised women in their pasts, making them wholly introspective, and fixing them in a therapeutic discourse which renders them passive and compliant – a state that is often characterised as ‘rehabilitation’. Many women in prison uncritically absorb and regurgitate the gender-biased official rhetoric concerning psychological interventions in which the problem is perceived to be with them, not in their social circumstances.
This needs to change. Why is it that when women in prison express anger and defiance, it’s regarded as a loss of control, rather than an attempt to exert control? Why do we persist in trying to help women in prison address their anger, low self-esteem, and inability to trust others in an environment that fosters frustration, infantilisation, and mistrust? What could we do to empower these women, to nurture self-directedness, passion, and healthy resistance, rather than conformity? Self-esteem, not self-doubt? Rebelliousness, rather than submissiveness?
A second good passage
If you think women’s prisons are full of Rose Wests and Myra Hindleys, think again. Eighteen per cent of all female prosecutions are for TV licence evasion and 21 per cent for theft from shops. Newspaper reports about supermarkets putting baby formula and nappies in locked cabinets in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis in 2023 underlined what a cruel, individualistic nation we’ve become – and the decision to build 500 new female prison places belies the fact that nearly all women who get sent to prison are the victims of much more serious crimes than they’re convicted of.
Having been neglected, treated as someone else’s property, abused, and assaulted throughout their lives, women enter prison only to find themselves subjected to a rigidity and authoritarianism that is just another exertion of patriarchal power and control. Far from encouraging them to experiment with their own decision-making, to make mistakes and recover from them, imprisonment reduces women to a childlike state where nearly all decisions of consequence are made for them, usually by men. Instead of encouraging autonomy, agency, ambition, and appropriate anger, prison dulls and pacifies through its architecture and aesthetics, its perpetuation of misogynistic stereotypes, and its heavy reliance on sedative medication, confining women in custody to a listless, soft-focus present with no achievable nor meaningful aspirations for the future.
Why isn’t the criminal justice system doing more for these women? Why isn’t prison preparing them to be skilled, independent, self-supporting, and financially astute when they leave custody? Why doesn’t prison strive to find the potential that lies within every human being and encourage women in custody to find their passion? Why don’t they get the kind of education that can stretch their minds and put fire in their bellies? Why aren’t they encouraged to find their voices and strengthen their self-esteem through writing, or art therapy for those who have lost their ability to verbalise their feelings because of trauma? Why shouldn’t ‘fallen’ women be encouraged to become feminists?
A third good passage
In 2015, I presented my research on humane imprisonment at the Ministry of Justice, and we discussed whether we could design windows with horizontal rather than vertical bars to permit a better view of whatever lay outside. The ministry said no. While horizontal bars might be allowed for women’s and children’s facilities, it was important to symbolically communicate ‘punishment’ to men by installing vertical bars.
Imagine my surprise, then, when at the beginning of 2019, I learned that, for the very first time in England’s penal history, five new medium-security men’s prisons were being built with no bars on the windows. The news, passed on to me by a journalist, that they’d had a change of heart and had done away with bars altogether, felt as significant as any other achievement in my research career. At the same time, the fact that the removal of bars from prison windows in the second decade of the 21st century should be front-page news in The Daily Telegraph makes me think that, as a society, we’re really not enlightened at all.