Stuart Mitson on his ‘Solution for London’
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 describes his ‘Solution for London’- a feasible and cost-effective way of providing additional prison places in London where they are currently needed most. Until now, this has been an unthinkable proposition.
According to recent estimates, there are about eleven thousand too few prison places in the London area to accommodate London’s convicted and remand prison population.
The proposal to site two or three of five new 1,500-bed prisons (mini-titans) in Essex will only bring partial relief to the capital’s prison accommodation crisis. It is, at best, only a part solution and hardly a very satisfactory one (not least because the mini-titan programme is merely the poor relation of the discredited titan programme). Essex is some way from London with all the problems of access for family visits, access to the courts and access to and for community and statutory organisations for rehabilitation purposes.
A further problem is finding suitable (very large) sites, particularly in the South East, but the problem is being encountered in West Yorkshire the North West and North Wales where other locations are sought for the mini-titans. To date, only one suitable site has been identified (Runwell, Essex). The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) recently contracted out the search for sites.
Other Solutions
Not infrequently in past years there has been debate about selling off the (once) prime development sites that London’s old Victorian prisons occupy and putting the resource into the development of a series of prisons for London around the M25 corridor.
The argument is (or was, in different economic times) that the solution is a ‘nil cost’ one because of the value of the vacated sites. Even if/ when this were so, the proposition suffers the same drawbacks as the Essex solution – that distances and access for all essential purposes will be problematic and will only worsen over time. If there is a case for the M25 corridor solution, that case is best made on the grounds that the old London prisons are sub-standard, cannot really be operated safely and decently and should be closed down on humanitarian grounds.
The M25 corridor solution will not solve access and rehabilitation problems.
The suggestion that prison ships might again become a feature on the Thames (a throwback to the ‘Hulks’ of the 1700’s!) though dreadful in aspect and impractical as a civilised solution, indicates the strength of conviction that the proper solution to the London problem is to accommodate London prisoners in prisons that are in London.
As we rightly look towards an increasingly relevant, adaptive and effective voluntary sector to assist significantly in the rehabilitation of offenders, it is all the more imperative for offenders to establish and/ or maintain connections with their communities throughout their prison sentence and that those communities, particularly families and voluntary organisations, have relatively straightforward access to the prisoners they will assist back into the community.
From time to time senior Prison Service staff have visited other administrations around the world searching for different approaches in prison design and management. In North America it is not unusual to find high-rise prisons in city centres. I have seen at first hand prisons in US cities that look like an office block rising above a city shopping mall or over a municipal building. Inside these jails, however, the picture is invariably disappointing. Nothing can be discovered in these high-rise prisons to commend them to the Prison Service of England and Wales. The general conditions and the management of prisoners, regimes, visiting facilities, etc., are less than acceptable compared to the standard of treatment aspired to in British prisons.
It is difficult to envisaged how British prisons, with emphasis on separate dedicated facilities for work, education, programmes, healthcare recreation and living accommodation, could translate into vertical rather than horizontal space without major compromise to their regimes and unthinkable complication and risk with prisoner movements. This has been a major stumbling block.
Onwards and Upwards
For these reasons the high-rise prison has never been given serious consideration in the UK. It is regarded as synonymous with prisoner warehousing which is over-restrictive on movement, barely decent, and an impediment to regime delivery which, in our experience, requires prisoner access through a considerable part of the prison. But the high-rise solution only appears impractical if we confine our method of regime delivery to the way we do things now. If there is a way of delivering effective regimes without 4-times-a-day prisoner mass movement, it could be a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water if we fail to consider the advantages of high-rise over the traditional approach as a solution for the inner city. The advantages are:
Land Take
The most obvious advantage of building upwards, not outwards, is reduced land take. The difference between a traditional prison and high-rise would be measured in many tens of acres. Purely in terms of footprint, the high-rise solution makes prisons in London a more feasible and affordable proposition. There is even a viable ‘nil land take’ way because, as we see from examples in other countries, high-rise city prisons can be built above public buildings such as council offices, court houses, police stations, fire stations, or over private developments of offices and shops.
Visibility
The prisons we build are unmistakeably prison institutions and something of a blot on the landscape. They look the way they do because they are bounded by thousands of metres of high, bleak perimeter wall or fencing. What makes high-rise a particularly apt solution for the city is that not only is no huge expanse of wall or fence required but, because vertical space provides much of the physical security, externally the architecture can be as presentable to the eye as any other modern city building. In it’s setting, the prison is ‘invisible’.
Security
For many reasons, building new prisons in city centre locations can seem impractical at first, and security considerations are not the least of the concerns. However, in many ways the high-rise solution has advantages over the traditional model. As already noted, vertical space is highly impenetrable and provides very effective perimeter security without recourse to additional walls and fences. Furthermore, the high-rise solution is effective proof against drugs being passed over the prison wall.
Access in and out of the high-rise city prison presents no special problem. It would not be dissimilar to entering any other secure building/car park, at street level or below, using interlocking gates.
Accessibility
The majority of London prisoners are located in prisons many miles from their homes and families and in many cases some hours’ journey away. Purely due to pressure of numbers within the system, London prisoners are regularly housed in prisons as far away as the Midlands and North East making a nonsense out of family visits. If more London prisoners were housed in city prisons family and official visitors could use London’s excellent public transport system and maintain meaningful and beneficial levels of contact.
Construction and Running Costs
Consideration for public opinion demands that conventional prisons are located as far from civilised communities as possible. Consequently there is little or no value in the site and its buildings for any other party. The opposite is true in the case of the city prison. The site/building will have potential for multi- occupancy and multi-use and thus possess significant commercial value which could be exploited to offset the costs and develop new avenues of financing the prison.
The High-rise Academy Prison
The principle objection to a high-rise solution for prison design in the UK has always been the very real difficulty of providing prisoner regimes and managing prisoner mass movements up and down vertical space. This appears as a difficulty because the traditional approach separates regime activity from living accommodation. But the problem is solved instantly by the ‘academy prison’ design.
The first principle of the academy prison is that prisoner accommodation (wings or house-blocks) and facilities for prisoner activities and training are co-located. The hugely positive impact of this upon prisoner movement and behaviour, as well as the numerous other advantages for staff, visitors, prisoners and the whole rehabilitative process, are detailed elsewhere1, 2. Here, we concern ourselves only with the application of this design to high-rise – and this is straightforward. The residential academies stack up vertically, each level housing prisoners together with their core activity and related education facility. The reduced number of prisoners involved in movements (no 4 times daily ‘mass movements’ in the academy model) and the reduced frequency of prisoner movements, overcomes previous objections about prisoner management. Exercise in the open air can be provided at rooftop level or ‘open’ areas at other levels (which would be useable in all weathers).
Summary
A huge number of additional prisoner places are required to accommodate remand and sentenced prisoners in London in order to maintain family contacts, serve the courts efficiently and enable rehabilitation through access to/ by an appropriate range of community support agencies and institutions.
Finding sites to build additional large prisons around London (in Essex, or the ‘M25 corridor’, for example) is not as straightforward as supposed – and does not provide a good solution in terms of accessibility for any of the basic and essential purposes, let alone the ‘desirable’ ones.
The possibility of acquiring sites in London for conventionally designed prisons can be discounted.
The solution is to build high-rise prisons for London and alleviate the chronic shortage of prisoner places which gives us the present overcrowded, unsafe prisons, poor regimes and lack of opportunity for rehabilitation. This feeds the revolving door nature of crime and ensures the prison population goes on rising.
Objections to high-rise prisons on the grounds that regimes cannot be delivered satisfactorily and that there are additional security risks are overcome in the academy prison design.
New commercial methods of financing the high-rise academy prisons should be explored with developers to make the scheme all the more affordable.
- Breakthrough Britain: Locked Up Potential. The Centre for Social Justice, 2009.
- A Revolution in Prison Design. http://www.mitsonconsulting.com
Please note; the Mitson Academy model and related intellectual property is owned by Mitson Consulting Ltd.
You can contact Mitson Consulting on +44 (0)113 393 4261.
