Making humane and healing custodial spaces

"You would have to have spent months living under a rock not to realise that our prison system is in crisis," Professor Jewkes told me as our discussions began. "After decades of underfunding and overcrowding, many prisoners live in cells with smashed windows and bloodstains on the walls. Dirty, lidless toilets that don't flush are positioned a few inches from pillows on broken beds. Staff absences are high, so classrooms are empty, and workshops remain closed. To combat the boredom, and 'escape' their filthy environments, prisoners take drugs that are flown in to order via drones, or sometimes smuggled in by officers, whose low wages make then susceptible to corruption. It is hard to imagine places less fit for good mental health or rehabilitation. What, however, if prisons weren't squalid, violent places? What if they were places of physical, mental and spiritual healing?"

Professor Jewkes (YJ): "My research expertise lies in the area of prison architecture and design, and I've worked as an advisor on many prison construction projects worldwide. My work is all about designing prisons to be humane, healing, hopeful environments, not places of punitive punishment. I'm proud of the influence I've had on the designs of our most recently built prisons in England. To take one example, they have no bars on the cell windows for the very first time in our penal history, as a direct result of the presentations I gave to the Ministry of Justice in the early planning stages. However, they are still massive warehouses that hold too many people in over-secure conditions. An architecture of hope would be conceived for a much smaller prison population than we currently have — based on values such as empathy, understanding, forgiveness, regrowth, renewal, and, of course, hope.

"I borrowed the term 'An Architecture of Hope' from Charles Jencks, the architectural theorist behind Maggie's Cancer Care Centres, which are inviting, trauma-informed, non-clinical places for cancer patients and their families," she continued. "An architecture of hope is about natural light, space, air, greenery, and a feeling of domesticity. It's the ability to control key elements of your environment; to exercise choice and autonomy over the place you must call home. The design brief for Maggie's Centres asks architects — who have included Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Zaha Hadid — to design buildings that hold qualities of safety and welcome in tension, alongside atmospheric affects that are surprising and thought-provoking.