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Book Review: Prison architecture: Policy, design and experience

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/146247450500700109
AuthorJohn Pratt
Date01 January 2005
Published date01 January 2005
Subject MatterArticles
06 048135 (to/d) 23/11/04 3:09 pm Page 98
PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 7(1)
Prison architecture: Policy, design and experience, Leslie Fairweather and Sean McConville
(eds). Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000, reprinted 2003. 162 pp. ISBN 0750642122.
As Stephen Shaw notes in his concluding chapter to this volume which has stemmed
from a 1998 symposium on prisons architecture, this subject has been of little interest
to academics, reformers and administrators (with one or two exceptions, such as the
editors of this volume). This, I think, is a great pity. For academics, as Robin Evans
(1982) beautifully illustrated, the architecture of nineteenth century prisons is just as
an important key to understanding their place in modern society as their internal
arrangements. Indeed, given the symbolism attached to the display of premodern and
early nineteenth century penal arrangements in Foucault’s (1978) Discipline and punish,
it now seems regrettable that this theme was not followed through in the book’s subse-
quent exposition of the birth of the prison. For historians, prison architecture has the
potential to be understood as an important feature of our cultural heritage as, in relation
to the United Kingdom, Allan Brodie and colleagues (Brodie, Croom and Davies, 1999)
have skilfully demonstrated. For reformers and administrators there is much to be
learned from past architectural and design mistakes. The now notorious Risley prison,
built in the north of England in the 1960s, was intended to throw off the dark, gloomy
legacy of Victorian prisons building. Smaller cells became the order of the day in this
era of prison building, based on the assumption that their inhabitants would spend
most of the day outside of them – working, learning, training and so on, as befits the
expectations of a humane prisons programme in a civilized society such as Britain. If
the architects at work on these designs are not to be blamed for the subsequent
cramming of three, sometimes four prisoners into one of these cells for up to 23 hours
a day as a result of the unanticipated growth of the prison population...

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