Chris Alker on the Architecture of Re-Socialization

Chris Alker

For the past fifteen years, five while attending the University of Texas at Austin and ten years working in the building industry, I have been a student of architecture.

Over these years my increasing frustration with the practice has led me to examine and re-examine the power of architecture.

In doing so, the words of the American architect Louis Sullivan, “Form ever follows function”, never seem to be far from my mind. However, it is not the skyscraper, for which Sullivan is best known, that, for me, most embodies his credo. Rather it is two often overlooked architectural typologies, the castle and the prison. Both architectures, absent from Spiro Kostof’s staple university text,

A History of Architecture, have most likely been glazed over due to their lack of importance in the development of architectural style, a common preoccupation regarding the history of our profession.

The castle, built throughout the world for over 900 years, was the cornerstone of military architecture and evolved in parallel with advances in weaponry and warfare technology. The Roman architect Vitruvius, mostly cited for his contribution of “Firmness, commodity and delight”, was integral to this evolution with his writings on the layout and construction of these strongholds. Every formal characteristic of the architecture (the angular towers, timber reinforced curtain walls, buttressed battlements,etc.) was in perfect harmony with an offensive or defensive application. With the invention of gunpowder in the 14^th century, and later the increasingly destructive power of artillery, the days of the castle eventually declined. Many were abandoned, or converted (or rather inverted), into prisons, as was the case with the French Alcatraz, Chateau d’if in the Mediterranean Sea.

Today castles stand as monuments of history visited by curious tourists and serve as the inspiration for kitschy McMansion builders. The prison on the other hand continues to be built and affect many people’s lives on a daily basis. Since 2006, it is estimated that at least 9.25 million people are currently imprisoned worldwide, and over 25% of them are housed in the American prison system. Whether this statistic is a result of our laws or the environment in which they were raised is still up for debate, but it is the role that architecture plays that is of great interest to me.

According to New York Times writer Jim Lewis, “It sounds odd to say, but it’s nonetheless true: we punish people with architecture. The building is the method. We put criminals in a locked room, inside a locked structure, and we leave them there for a specified period of time.”

As I see it, the “function” of prison architecture is threefold. These facilities are in place to (1) contain convicted criminals in order to protect society from future harm, (2) punish these individuals for their actions, and (3) to adjust their behavior so that they may successfully return to society as

Event Alert – Prisons & Correctional Facilities Asia

Strategies for the Planning, Design and Security of Prisons & Correctional Facilities Asia

Because of a rising inmate population in Asia, with existing obsolete prison security infrastructure, and an increasing need for better design and planning of prison facilities for rehabilitation programs, there is a growing concern to ensure the future growth and safety of our prisons and correctional facilities. Failure to address these needs would compromise the safety and effective functioning of these facilities.

The conference is being held on the 24th & 25th of May 2011, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – you can find out more by visiting; http://www.prisonsasia.com

Government IQ Asia is putting together the very first Prisons & Correctional Facilities Asia event to bring together the Heads, Commissioners and Director Generals of Prison HQs and Ministries of Justice to talk about the future roadmap and modernisation efforts of Asian governments.

Prisons & Correctional Facilities Asia will feature a regional and international line up of experts, including:

• Jamaluddin Bin Saad, Deputy Commissioner General of Prisons, MALAYSIAN PRISONS DEPARTMENT HQ
• RN Sharma, Deputy Inspector General, Prisons, PRISON HQ, INDIA
• Nishan Chandrajith Dhanasinghe, Commissioner of Prisons, MINISTRY OF JUSTICE, SRI LANKA
• Untung Sugiyono, Director General of Corrections, MINISTRY OF JUSTICE, INDONESIA
• General Ernesto El Diokno, Director, BUREAU OF CORRECTIONS, PHILIPPINES
• Hiroshi Nishida, Director of General Affairs, Corrections Bureau, MINISTRY OF JUSTICE, JAPAN

Email enquiry@iqpc.com.sg or log on to http://www.prisonsasia.com/ for the full agenda of the conference.

Stuart Mitson is a former Prison Governor and Prison…

Stuart Mitson is a former Prison Governor and Prison Director with more than 25 years operational experience in both the public and private sector. He currently leads a uniquely qualified and experienced team at Mitson Consulting Ltd offering consultancy on the design, construction and operation of new prisons.

In this article Stuart discusses The Carpenter’s House Prison Project which shows an innovative community-needs approach to prison development and an understanding that offending is a local problem and therefore best dealt with a local solution.

It stands to reason that local people will be less aggressive against the development of new prisons in their local area if they are going to detain local people who offend. Compared with the prospect of many thousands of prisoners being shipped in from all over the country in to their back-yard such a sensible approach to dealing with offenders can make a lot of sense, not only for the benefits it can bring to reducing reoffending, but also with getting wider stakeholder buy-in.

Introduction

Two years ago, a faith-based organisation in Cornwall, known as The Carpenter’s House, began researching a better way to ‘do prison’ – with the primary objective of establishing a prison in Cornwall to house Cornish prisoners and better serve the local community by addressing the rehabilitative needs of offenders to reduce re-offending.  In the interests of the wider community, the initiative also aims to reduce the cost of imprisonment.  This ambitious project was conceived after Conservative Local Councillor, Mike Critchley, Lt. Cdr. RN Rtd., attended the ‘Believing in Local Action’ seminar addressed by the Cabinet Office.

Cornwall is a remote corner of the UK and probably the only English county without a prison.  This means that offenders resident in the county who receive a custodial sentence must serve that sentence some distance from home.  In the case of women, young offenders and high security prisoners the distance may be very considerable indeed.  This is not only detrimental specifically to maintaining important family ties but has serious implications for the whole process of resettlement and rehabilitation.

Figures provided by the National Offender Management Service indicate there are approximately 350 serving prisoners whose home address is in Cornwall.  Less than 80 of these would require any special sort of prison facility outside the county if the county had a single medium-to-low security custodial facility.

Background

The group also entered into an alliance with Kainos Community, a registered charity that delivers a remarkable Prison Service accredited resettlement and rehabilitation programme in three UK prisons. Over a period of 13 years, the programme has consistently reduced reoffending from 65% (national average) to 35% generally or 13% in the case of reoffending leading to custodial sentence³.  It is estimated that the reduction in re-offending achieved by Kainos Community in three prisons, last year equated to a saving of £8million.In April 2009, the Centre for Social Justice published a major report on prison reform.¹ The Carpenter’s House group, encouraged by the recommendation that Devon and Cornwall be selected as areas to pilot new Community Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts (CPRTs), invited prison designer Stuart Mitson² to join their project.  In the following months fundraisers Resonance Ltd., were appointed and a formal steering group representing a range of local community interests was established under the chairmanship of Critchley and management consultant Julian Furbank of Furbank & Company.

Critchley and Furbank have had a number of meetings at senior level in the Cabinet Office (Office of the Third Sector), the Ministry of Justice (National Offender Management Service) and the Centre for Social Justice as well as with their local Unitary Council.  The response has been very encouraging.

Project Development

In January 2010 members of the group together with an official from the Ministry of Justice (NOMS) visited a faith-based rehabilitation project at a prison near Stuttgart, Germany⁴. The project is the result of 13 years work by prison governor Tobias Merckle, whose vision has been brought about in conjunction with an enthusiastic regional Minister of Justice. The rehabilitation project has an impressive success rate and another region of Germany is now asking to be considered for a similar project.

The concept of a prison for Cornwall is now evolving rapidly from initial aspiration into a blueprint for an effective solution.  A unique prison model for Cornwall (outlined below) is being developed out of local needs and adapted concepts that are rooted in sound practice. But perhaps the most intriguing and significant aspect of this venture is that not only do we get a glimpse of how community management of a prison-and-rehabilitation project could actually work, but we are also presented with a completely new concept for ‘prison’ in Cornwall that the community has designed!  This goes way beyond the level of community engagement that anyone would dare to conceive of in the field of offender management. Here we have a community designing and building the kind of prison they want, directing and managing it in the way they want, operating it in accordance with their design, and managing the rehabilitation of offenders back into their community in one seamless process.  The startling thing is that their solution looks so very credible. It will work for Cornwall, though clearly not for everywhere.  The wider application of this project is that communities in other counties would follow the same principles and come up with models that would work for them.

The Shrinking Prison

Other traditions of prison design and construction which are turned on their head in the Cornish project, are those of durability and (more recently) expandability.The proposed prison for Cornwall is designed on the basis of rehabilitation first and incarceration second.  This is not to suggest that the prison element will be any less secure than necessary.  However, instead of starting with the requirements of a