Health and Well-Being in Prison Design

A Theory of Prison Systems and a Framework for Evolution

Alberto Urrutia-Moldes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367765637
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000578980
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Criminology

This book establishes a new framework for prison design to promote the health and well-being of all prison users. Based on international research in Norway, Finland, the USA, and Chile, and drawing on the expertise of key international advisors, this book uniquely reveals the perspectives of both designers and prison authorities concerning well-being in prison architecture. It is the first book to compare perspectives between prison models while providing essential guidance for the design of prison environments to promote the rehabilitation of inmates and their desistance from crime.

The promotion of health and well-being of people in prison is vital to enable rehabilitation. Traditional prison architecture severely weakens both rehabilitation efforts and opportunities for desistance. Only a handful of prison systems in the world have shown significant changes in their prison designs. Underpinned by Critical Realism and the PERMA theory of well-being, this book reveals significant new insights to inform prison design. The author presents international case study research with interviews with prison authorities and designers from four countries and the three different prison models, as well as key international United Nations advisors. For the first time the visions of prison designers are contrasted with those of prison authorities, bringing a new synthesised understanding of the differences and similarities in their approach to the health and well-being of both inmates and staff from which to generate a new framework for design considerations.

This book illuminates new directions for prison design and is essential reading for policymakers, academics, and students involved in the study and development of criminology, corrections, and penology. It is also an indispensable source of up-to-date knowledge for prison authorities, public health officials, architects, and designers involved in the design of prisons and any other type of coercive detention facilities.

Part ITheoretical and historical foundations

Chapter 1Theoretical standpoints

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167549-3

The roots of well-being

Philosophers have traditionally divided well-being approaches into two theoretical approaches: hedonism and eudemonism. We will start by clarifying the roots of both hedonic and eudemonic approaches, to understand what they are, why they are different, and why the eudemonic one appears best to address prison design.

Hedonic perspective

The Greek philosopher Aristippus, a pupil of Socrates, proposed the concept of hedonia saying that the goal of life is to experience the maximum amount of pleasure while minimising pain. Philosophers generally associated with imprisonment, such as Hobbes (1588–1679), DeSade (1740–1814), and Bentham (1748–1832), followed Aristippus’ ideas. Since then, the focus of the hedonic approach has evolved from physical pleasure to a broader approach, that includes the preferences and pleasures of the mind ²². For hedonic psychologists, the terms well-being and the hedonic approach have similar meanings. They both consist of subjective happiness that includes all judgements about the good/bad elements of life. The classical behavioural theories of reward and punishment, and theories focused on cognitive expectations ²³, typically associated with theories that justify the use of prison, are rooted in hedonic psychology, because their model of criminal behaviour considers humans as acting out of freedom of choice, using rational decisions that balance the costs (pain) and benefits (pleasure) of their potential acts.

The concept of subjective well-being (SWB), proposed by Diener in 1984, is the most widely used hedonic approach ²⁴. It aims to evaluate the balance of three components: life satisfaction, positive affects, and negative affects. SWB incorporates both your hedonic experiences (sensations, emotions, and mood) and your evaluation of how well you think life is going. Diener sees SWB as an umbrella term that combines how we think, and feel about our lives ²⁵.

In their work “Pursuing Happiness,” Lyubomirsky and colleagues further propose that happiness (or SWB) is affected by three factors: genetic, life circumstances, and intentional activities (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The components that determine happiness

They suggest that the genetic set point of well-being is different for each person, and accounts for about 50% of the changes in well-being. Moreover, life circumstances – which may include factors related to people’s nationality, and their geographical, and cultural characteristics, as well as demographic variables such as their age, gender, and ethnic origin – account for more or less 10%. Finally, activities – which is a very broad category including a wide variety of things that people do and think in their daily lives – explain around 40% of the changes in subjective well-being.

Prison architecture and its environmental design can thus be placed within life circumstances, because most of the time, inmates in prison cannot choose or modify where they have to live. This opens up a promising window for influencing the improvement of inmates’ well-being by fulfilling their basic human needs. However, once these basic needs are fulfilled, it is not possible to improve people’s well-being, solely by improving life circumstances ^26(p118). To use architecture and design to improve people’s well-being beyond this point needs a further focus on creating built and natural environments that facilitate and promote rewarding intentional activities.

Although among psychologists SWB is currently the dominant concept to explain happiness, there are critiques about simplistically presenting a complex issue, stating that well-being cannot be reduced to only immediately gratifying experiences ²⁷. Others ²⁸ propose a broader discussion of the concepts and possible methods involved, arguing for example that people may score high satisfaction with the education being offered when it is objectively very poor, reflecting their lack of perspective to make judgements, rather than showing the good quality of the offered education. A eudemonic perspective addresses these concerns by avoiding simplified answers to complex issues and addressing concepts of objectively valuable behaviours, as shown next.

Eudemonic perspective

For Aristotle, as a eudemonic Greek philosopher, true happiness is found in doing what is worth doing, which express virtue. He refers to hedonic happiness as a vulgar idea that would convert humans into slaves of desires, differentiating the hedonic goal of happiness per se from eudemonic, which is rooted in human nature and whose realisation is conducive to human growth ²⁹. From the eudemonic perspective, living a good life means living to one’s fullest potential by virtue or excellence. Well-being, therefore, is not simply the pursuit of pleasure, but rather “the struggle for perfection that represents the realization of true potential” ^30(p100). Pursuing meaningful goals is not only a robust pathway to more positive emotion and more life satisfaction, but in times of adversity such as the time spent in prison, meaning-making is also a powerful resource that can help reduce psychological harm ³¹. Perhaps the major difference between the eudemonic perspective of well-being and the hedonic view is that, while the latter focuses on feeling good, eudemonic theories target both the process of living well and the value of positive states, other than positive emotion ³². At the start of the 21st century, eudemonic perspectives of well-being developed a new branch in the field of psychology. This branch is known as Positive Psychology and is explored next.

Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology emerges as the newest wave of psychology following the previous disease, behaviour centred, and humanistic psychology models. Historically, psychology has been largely focused on the causes of pathologies, healing, and repairing damage to allow people to return to a functional life. Conversely, Positive Psychology calls for the study of healthy people, to understand what actions lead to well-being, positive individuals, and thriving communities, focusing on meaning, human strengths and happiness, and the conditions and processes that contribute to the optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions. Positive Psychology is based on three main principles, namely: the study of positive emotions; the study of positive traits such as strengths, virtues, and abilities; and the study of positive institutions ³³. These three principles are interlinked when positive institutions promote virtues that, in turn, make it possible to generate positive emotions such as confidence, hope, and trust. Positive psychology stresses the need for promoting “positive institutions”, that move individuals to become more responsible, altruists, civilised, moderated, tolerant, and better citizens.

Positive psychologists stimulate a positive perspective, bringing to the surface the best properties in life. They aim to understand three central issues: the nature of the effective functioning of a human being; who has successfully evolved and learned skills; and how to explain the fact that, despite all the difficulties, the majority of people manage to live lives of dignity and purpose. However, Positive Psychology has not been without its critics. For example, positive qualities, such as optimism, can sometimes harm well-being, whereas apparently negative processes (like anxiety) may at times contribute to it ³⁴. Others argue that Positive Psychology depends strongly on positivity, which is correlated with inaccuracy regarding reality (positive illusion) ³⁵. They also suggest that there is a correlation between highly positive people and negative behaviours such as suppressed psychological growth, inability to self reflect, and radical intolerance, also linked with the most extreme forms of behaviour in human history, such as the Nazi party or the Stalinist era. These critiques, however, have also been refuted ^36(p91) because the aim of positive pyschology is to build up what is known about human resilience and strength, while integrating and complementing this positive knowledge with the existing, more negative knowledge base ³⁷. Many critiques are also no longer applicable, as Positive Psychology has become more mature in recent years ³⁸. Positive psychologists argue that although traditional psychology has made great strides in understanding what goes wrong, these have come at the cost of understanding what the strengths and virtues that allow people to live a good life are ^37(p105).

Unlike hedonic theories that only focus on feeling good or on a positive subjective evaluation as the target outcomes, eudemonic theories target both the value of positive states (other than positive emotion and positive evaluations) and the process of living well. The current primary eudemonic theories here are Self-Determination Theory, Psychological Well-being Theory, and Seligman’s Well-being Theory.

Self-Determination Theory is focused on Input resource variables of well-being, such as income or the personality trait of extraversion. Psychological Well-being Theory is focused on internal states influencing well-being (Processes variables such as good mood and the expectation of success). However, Seligman’s Well-being Theory combines both Inputs and Processes with Outcomes variables, which are the intrinsically valuable behaviours that reflect the attainment of well-being, which makes it the most appropriate lens for researching well-being with prison design. The explanation of his theory, its strength and criticism will be covered next.

Seligman’s theory of well-being

Seligman argues that well-being is a construct that consists of five key components: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment; forming the acronym PERMA ³⁹. Each of these components is explained in more detail below.

Positive emotions: Happiness and life satisfaction, as subjective measures, are relevant to the well-being theory but cannot sustain well-being by themselves. Positive emotions can include feelings of belonging, feeling safe, feeling satisfied with their work, and/or learning. It manifests when people are proud, curious, excited, and relate to events from the past (e.g. being satisfied, and feeling serenity), the present (e.g. calm, excitement and pleasure), or the future (e.g. optimism, faith and hope).

Engagement: This is the psychological state in which individuals are absorbed by, and focused on what they are doing, and its evaluation is subjective. Engagement is also defined as “flow” ⁴⁰ which is a state of being completely absorbed in doing a task. Work is one of the most important sources of “flow”. This is important concerning prison design, where inmates either do or do not have a chance to do meaningful work.

Relationship: People need to establish healthy relationships with others to achieve well-being, and create sources of support that can be used in anxiety moments or during sharing moments of ecstasy and joy. For example, women prisoners who report having good friends in prison are 41% more likely to feel control over their daily lives than those who don’t ⁴¹. Other findings suggest that, in general, those who engage emotionally with others tend to develop more adaptive strategies to face situations considered difficult ³⁹. How a prison is designed in terms of layout, architectural programme, and whether spaces that promote social interaction are included will determine whether or not these types of positive relationships can exist.

Meaning: This component relates to the search for purpose in life. A meaningful life consists of belonging and serving something one believes is greater than the self, and is defined and measured independently from positive emotion or engagement. Studies have shown that people who belong to a group and pursue shared goals are happier than people who do not ⁴². Therefore, the design of prisons that promotes social contact or the acquisition of labour skills can help here.

Accomplishment: This last component describes what people effectively do to achieve well-being through living a productive and meaningful life ⁴³. Setting tangible goals, and keeping them in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical and historical foundations
• Part II Human factors and the importance of the health and well-being of prison users
• Part III Case studies from the Hybrid, the Security, and the Rehabilitation models
• Part IV Towards a new outline framework for prison design
• Appendix A: Physical stressors for health and well-being to be considered in the design of health and well-being promoting prisons
• Appendix B: Psychological stressors for health and well-being to be considered in the design of health and well-being promoting prisons
• Appendix C: Codebook manifest content analysis
• References
• Index