The Prison Cluster design
The scale of a prison has a direct impact on the ability of the management to control, protect and rehabilitate prisoners. Following the Strageway Prison riots in 1990, Lord Woolf’s report recommended that the maximum size of a prison should be four hundred prisoners.
Keeping prisons to a scale where prisoners can be seen and known as people rather than faces or numbers will also help prisoners feel like individuals who have ‘worth’ and matter to society; it is well known that the larger an institution the more ‘anonymous’ people can be which has direct impact on people’s behavior.
“Big institutions are places where riots happen, and there has been no shortage of riot studies in criminal justice.” 7
Prison cluster concept
Prisons can be built in clusters of four or more, built on smaller plots of land and serviced by centralised kitchen and laundries. The central unit does not necessarily need to be attached to a prison building itself, however should be based close enough to all cluster prisons to allow ease of management.
The central unit would manage:
- Prisoner transfer management including management of where each prisoner should be put, based on the prisoner’s history and conviction. Prisoners who cause trouble or become at risk in certain institutions may require relocation.
- Quality control and criminal investigation unit providing a central criminal activity investigation providing a strong link between prisons and the police. A body for the investigation of staff corruption & prisoner offences will help to create an impartial criminal justice system.
- Kitchen & Laundry allowing trusted prisoners near the end of their sentences or lower category prison prisoners to work in the central kitchen and laundry providing them with a ‘halfway’ house style employment system.
Central laundry and kitchens could be attached to one of the prisons depending on prisoner ‘type’.
System benefits
These include;
- Prisoners can be held more locally to their families allowing regular visits, reducing financial pressures on family members and helping to keep family units together,
- Approximately 6% of the prison population is female8 therefore one out of every 16 prisons can be a women’s prison enabling a reduction in the distance they are held from their town of conviction,
- It can enable a prison warden to know all of the prisoners on an individual basis. This provides feeling of value within society and moves the prisoner further from the dehumanisation anonymity and loss of identity brings,
- Reduced risk of serious problems or prison riots,
- Lesser impact on local populations than a large prisons & ability to be built on smaller & more available Brownfield sites
Female prisoners « Prison Design 2:42 pm on December 4, 2009 Permalink |
[...] Female prisoners 2009 December 4 tags: female prisoners, prison size, prisoner saftey, reducing reoffending by nathanjmurphy Statistics show that nearly two thirds of female prisoners have a drug problem, over half have suffered domestic abuse, one in three have been victims of sexual abuse, sixty six percent are mothers and of those thirty percent have their children taken in to care and one in five are foreign nationals18. On top of this; one in four women in prison have spent time in local authority care as a child and sixty percent are imprisoned outside of their home region18. (See cluster concept that could allow female prisoners, around 20% of prisoner totals, to be kept c… [...]