Prison Architecture

Leslie Fairweather, Sean McConville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135142568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Current and future prison designs are examined in this book, within the government's prison building programme, and the confines of current penal philosophies and legislation. America has led the way in prison design, with two main types of architecture predominating: radial layouts (outside cells with windows) and linear blocks (inside cells with grilles). Now, 'new' generation prisons (central association surrounded by small groups of cells) look set to become the fashion. But are they a better answer, and should they be copied worldwide before we know? Architects and administrators show in this book the designs of these 'new generation' prisons and assess their impact. Most countries in central Europe also have a rising crime rate and a demand for new prisons. Contributions from significant architects from the UK, Europe and America comment on these issues. Other topics within the book are: setting current prison architecture and design against an historical setting; looking at penal ideas and prison architecture and design in the post-war period; the psychological effects of the prison environment; the influence of technology and design on security management; and how prison architecture and design can be more flexible and innovative.

1 The architectural realization of penal ideas

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Seán McConville

Prison construction is booming across the industrialized world. Since the late 1970s, around 1000 new prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Rates of incarceration had been fairly stable there for most of this century, but doubled in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. There are now around two million American adults incarcerated, a number that is currently being added to at a rate of between 50 000 and 80 000 annually. With an incarceration ratio of 645 per 100 000 of the general population, the United States now imprisons a higher portion of its population than any other Western nation. The gross numbers are in themselves astonishing; 17 states have smaller populations than America's penal estate. Even at state level the figures are formidable. By itself, California has the largest prison system in the Western world, having grown from around 20 000 in 1977 to 94 000 in 1990 and 159 000 in 1998. Despite an enormous construction programme, the state's prisons remain grossly overcrowded¹ and its Department of Corrections estimates that over the next decade $6.1 billion more will be required simply to keep overcrowding at current levels.²

The expansion in Europe has not been as great or dramatic, but it has been substantial in many countries.³ In 1974, England and Wales had an average daily prison population of some 37 000; by 1990 this had grown to 45 000 and by mid-1999 to 65 000.⁴ Between 1993 and 1997 there was an increase of almost 40 per cent. There has been a building programme to match. In 1978, less than a quarter of prison accommodation in England and Wales was twentieth century and purpose-built, and 40 per cent of prisoners were sleeping two or three to a cell.⁵ Twenty years later there were 136 prisons, and in addition to the many new institutions there has been, since the mid-1980s, a major programme of refurbishment and extension of existing stock. However, the pressure on accommodation is inexorable. The 1997 rate of incarceration in England and Wales - 120 per 100 000 of general population - is now the second highest in Western Europe, although still modest in comparison to Russia (687) and the USA (645).⁶ Home Office projections envisage a prison population of between 64 400 and 92 600 in 2004-5.⁷

Yet for all this enormous expenditure, the nature of the connection between rates of imprisonment and crime rates is far from certain. Much crime is unreported, undetected, unprosecuted and unpunished, and when, through victim surveys, one looks at this hidden crime (the so-called 'dark figure'), one sees a declining or static picture. The most recent American criminal victimization survey reported rates of property and violent crime which were the lowest since victim surveys started in 1973;⁸ the equivalent British survey shows no movement in overall crime figures.⁹ The uncertainties of reporting, together with police, prosecutorial and sentencing policies, all control the volume and characteristics of those who pass from the offence to prison, and determine how long they will remain there; there is no 'natural' connection between crime and punishment.

The criminal law deals with a wide and heterogeneous range of activities - from reckless or dangerous industrial, environmental and road traffic matters to treason; from rape and murder to the smallest of thefts; common assault to large-scale fraud; and drug-dealing to animal cruelty. Despite this variety in crimes and dispositions, most of those who make their way to prison are young men with prior criminal convictions. Women, the elderly and the handicapped remain a small proportion of the prison population, but they have particular needs and often require special services and accommodation.¹⁰ There is a tendency to overlook these groups, both in prison management policies and regimes and in design and construction, but there can be little doubt that they will grow in size and proportion, and their special needs will become more pressing.¹¹

The vast bulk of prisoners have committed offences of violence or theft, although these categories have been substantially augmented in the last two decades by drugs and drug-related offences. In 1996, the offences of state prisoners in America were as follows: violence, 47 per cent; property, 23 per cent; drugs, 23 per cent; and public order and other, 7 per cent.¹² In federal prisons the figures are much more skewed to drug offences because of the different jurisdictional powers, and in 1996 violent offenders comprised 12.4 per cent of federal prisoners; property offenders, 8.4 per cent; drugs, 59.6 per cent; public order, 18.6 per cent; and other or unknown, 1.0 per cent.¹³ In English prisons, 21 per cent of male prisoners had committed sexual or violent offences, 40 per cent property offences, 14 per cent drug offences and 11 per cent 'other' offences. No less than one-third of female prisoners had been sentenced for drug offences.¹⁴

Penal policy

Given the heterogeneity of offences and the multipurpose nature of prisons and jails, it is always misleading to discuss penal philosophy as though some kind of coherent and unified policy determined the disposal of all offenders. The careless or dangerous motorist is likely to be the subject of a deterrent sentence; a compulsive sex-offender may draw a reformatory or, more likely, an incapacitory one. A judge will want to keep the professional armed robber out of action for a lengthy period, both as retribution and as a deterrent to the offender and like-minded confederates. Indeed, to assert one sentencing priority in all circumstances would produce injustices and lead to a failure of public confidence in criminal justice. There have always been gaps between the rhetoric, high philosophy and academic and judicial debates about sentencing, the sentencing conducted in the courts, and what goes on in prisons; this is no bad thing, but it can deceive the outsider who does not know the system.

Since the mid-1960s, the ostensible penal consensus has moved from reform to retribution to incapacitation, all with surprising ease and, considering the moral, humanitarian and practical issues at stake, with surprisingly little research. The switch away from reformatory punishment exemplifies this process. It came in response to a set of rather undiscriminating empirical findings and a strange political alliance. Evaluation studies - measuring the effect of different types of prison programmes in terms of the subsequent offending behaviour of those who passed through them - suggested that the claims which were being made for various types of reformatory treatment could not be supported. Given the heterogeneity of offenders, the vast scope of their impulses to crime and the range of penal regimes and conditions, a general statement about the lack of success is hardly surprising. One approach might have been to redesign and refine programmes, better to match them with types of offenders. This was probably beyond the management skills of the penal managers of the time, and what actually happened was that it was proclaimed with increasing unanimity and fervour that 'nothing works'. This generalization met with a ready response from both the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum, while its soundbite quality gave the notion considerable momentum.

Liberals had long been concerned about unsubstantiated reformatory claims and the sloppy evasions of some penal administrators, who had acquired great discretionary powers. An offender sentenced to a one- to five-year term, for example, would be released when enough favourable reports had been obtained from the prison authorities to secure a positive decision from the parole board. In England, after 1968, discretionary release on parole could come after one-third of the sentence was served and was equally dependent on officials' recommendations. The English notion was that freedom should come at an optimum point, supposedly when the prisoner would be least likely to reoffend. Apart from the lack of evidence to support such a theory this amounted to resentencing, usually without the benefit of due process; it violated the separation of functions and powers basic to legality and democracy, and almost from the outset the scheme was criticized in England.¹⁵ Release turned on prison behaviour as interpreted and reported by staff, and in any event of no demonstrable predictive value; a good prisoner might not make a particularly good citizen and vice versa. Great weight was given to such non-juridical factors as the state of the offender's marriage and the availability of accommodation and employment after release, and critics condemned the whole process for caprice, uncertainty and substantial injustice. There were calls for sentencing to be limited solely to the harm done by offenders and to their culpability; supposedly predictive characteristics, positive and negative, together with all factors not immediately relevant to the criminal process, should be excluded from sentencing.

Many conservatives were equally unhappy with the assumptions implicit in the penal process. Criminal justice (and much of civil society), they argued, is based upon the notion of free will, for without that there can be no choice, no culpability and therefore no justification for punishment; the very notion of moral capacity depends upon free choice. Emphasizing reformation as a prime objective of sentencing allowed the concept of individual responsibility to be diluted, since it suggested a deficiency - social or psychological - which had to be rectified, and this in turn implied that it was not the individual but his or her circumstances that were culpable. Ultimately, this doctrine suggested that all criminals, by Erewhonian logic, should be considered mentally ill. Even short of this extremity, social, cultural and psychological determinism was seen as an attack on the moral structure of society. The treatment philosophy had a malign political influence by allowing criminals to represent themselves as victims of circumstance, rather than as responsible persons who had made wrong and bad choices. By contrast, retribution unambiguously upheld individual responsibility, and made it clear that the purpose of the criminal process and penal system was to identify wrongdoers and to punish them to the extent of the harm that they had caused. Some who took this view also argued that repeated offending should attract cumulatively severe sentences, since persistent criminality aggravated culpability by showing contempt for society and the legal process.

Some liberal thinkers also rejected deterrence, arguing that it was simply a sub-set of reformation, achieved by severe and harsh rather than positive means. Those who have favoured deterrence in penal policy and administration have always emphasized behaviour rather than motivation. They have had little concern whether an offender refrained from further criminality because of a change of heart, or because of the unpleasant and painful memory of punishment (or knowledge of others' punishment). At the heart of deterrence theory is a belief that, in making decisions about crime, the offender at some point more or less rationally balances the rewards of crime against the risks and pains of being caught and punished. Certain liberal and religious thinkers objected to such a theory of humanity, particularly when applied to exemplary deterrence; others maintained that there was little distinction between reformatory treatment of a vigorous and unpleasant kind (and incarceration can scarcely fail to be either) and a regime which was in all its details explicitly, positively and intentionally deterrent. On grounds of principle they were therefore unlikely to lament the removal of deterrence from the penal agenda.

Conservatives were equally divided about the place of deterrence in criminal and penal policy. Some argued that it strengthened law-abiding reflexes in society - in the words of the nineteenth-century English jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen:

Some men, probably, abstain from murder because they fear that if they committed murder they would be hanged. Hundreds of thousands abstain from it because they regard it with horror. One great reason why they regard it with horror is that murderers are hanged with the hearty approbation of all reasonable men.

Deterrence and the notion of choice that it embodies appealed to those who could envisage choices being influenced by the apparatus of order. That choice might be governed by the apprehension of arrest, trial and painful punishment rather than by an ethical reflection upon right and wrong hardly mattered; the latter would perhaps have been more welcome, but it was the outcome that was critical. This simplicity in objective lent itself to empirical testing, which showed that deterrence was apparently no more successful in producing positive outcomes than reformatory treatment. These evaluations were no more sophisticated when applied to deterrence than they had been with reformatory penal measures.¹⁶ The general message, which was nevertheless widely received, was: don't waste time with deterrent programmes, since the offender is incapable or unwilling to make choices, even when confronted with probably adverse consequences.

Of the principal penal objectives retribution and incapacitation are left, and these are notions that appeal to many in both liberal and conservative camps. The difficulty for retributivists is to construct a rational and defensible matrix that will produce a suitable sentence and regime for each crime and offender. Sentences and forms of punishment can be pulled out of the air (or, rather, the traditions of sentencing); it is much more difficult - or impossible - to argue that these scales have a rational basis. It might be argued that they resemble a bizarre and hopeless kind of algebra in which random and changing values have to be determined without the benefit of quadratic equations. There must be a significant degree of arbitrariness in the assignment of punishment x for aggravated rape, y for large-scale fraud, and z for drug-dealing. Without a general logic, scales of retribution are open to ideological manipulation and are constantly vulnerable to the pressures arising from exceptional and outrageous crime, the volatility of public opinion, and the opportunism of politicians. The many changes in the sentencing 'tariff over the years, and the great variation between countries (and sometimes regions and localities), underline this point.

The politics of punishment

In the United States, the modern politicization of penal policy has been traced to Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. When the heat of that battle died, however, penal policy largely continued to be conducted on a bipartisan basis. In 1970, Congress repealed almost all mandatory sentences for drug offences. State prison populations were falling, despite increases in the US general population, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons was planning to close some of its large and outdated prisons. The use of drugs as an effective campaign issue in 1973 by Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican governor of New York, who demanded mandatory life sentences for all drug dealers, fatefully changed the context and tempo of criminal policy debates. Rockefeller had simultaneously sensed, hoped to benefit from and contributed to a swing in public attitudes towards drug addicts and their suppliers. The issue moved decisively from public health to the penal arena. Concurrently, social protection in the form of long mandatory sentences began to mingle with and gradually replace retribution as a leading factor in penal thinking. The cocaine epidemic that hit America's metropolitan areas in the 1980s moved beyond rational policy responses into the rhetoric and attitudes of war.

A similar if less extreme shift occurred in the United Kingdom a decade later. British penal policy (apart from extremists on both sides) had been almost entirely bipartisan. However, in the struggle between political parties there comes a moment when tactical needs overwhelm any desire for or tendency towards consensus, and the sense of what constitutes an acceptable and honourable competitive agenda is substantially modified. Such a point was reached in British politics in 1993 when Michael Howard succeeded Kenneth Clarke as Home Secretary. The latter occupied a middle position in his party, and had adopted an aggressive but still generally bipartisan approach to criminal policy. Apparently through a combination of conviction and ministerial ambition, Michael Howard decided to make criminal justice policy (for which his office was largely responsible) a spearhead in his party's electoral strategy.¹⁷

Michael Howard's central statement on criminal justice policy was that 'prison works'. Although he acknowledged that imprisonment could serve a variety of functions, what he primarily meant was that locked-up offenders could not commit crime.¹⁸ From this it followed that longer periods of incarceration were better than shorter ones, and that it would be in the public interest for more rather than fewer offenders to be imprisoned. Both by exhortation (urging the judges and ...