Stuart Mitson is a former Prison Governor and Prison…

Stuart Mitson PortraitStuart 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 secure institution and, as it were, working out from that point into the community, the rehabilitation and community element is considered first and permitted to shape the essential characteristics and design of the prison.

Prisons must be built to last and, it would seem, expand to cope with ever-rising numbers of prisoners.  If the Cornish prison deals exclusively with Cornish prisoners and is largely successful in rehabilitating them, the number of prisoner places required in the county in five or ten years would be considerably less than the 270 or so required today.  The Cornish prison would be built to ‘shrink’ by turning over some of its facilities for other community use when they become redundant to the prison.

This is revolutionary.  But if we go on building prisons the same way we have always built them, we shall achieve the same result we have always achieved – 65% failure rate (higher in the case of young prisoners), an ever expanding prison population and escalating cost to society.

Prison Design: The Cornish Model

Research into ‘what works’ in offender rehabilitation is very clear. Prisoners who have the highest chance of resettlement without further offending are those who, on release, have stable accommodation, family (or equivalent) support mechanisms, work, or other legitimate means of financial support, and access to help with addictions and other health issues.  The Cornish Prison model begins by addressing the deficiency in these ingredients and the first to be supplied are accommodation, work, and ‘family’ support. The other ingredients are, by and large, supplied in various ways by the statutory agencies.

Based on the successful Stuttgart project, the first building blocks in the Cornish prison go to provide accommodation in (or facing) the community where small numbers of prisoners will live with a host family and go out to work or attend college during the day, as appropriate.

Fig 1

This is not unlike the Community Supervised Homes for Offenders (CSHO) described by Aitken5 except that here they are part of a prison campus.  When there is migration from these homes on the prison campus to homes in the community, the assessment of risk would be more certain and selection would not need to be restricted to the elderly and disabled.  The figure opposite illustrates the emerging prison design concept.

It begins in the wider community with consideration of the structures and resources required for (a) meeting the rehabilitative needs of prisoners after their sentence and (b) the provision of CSHOs together with work or education places as an alternative to imprisonment for those who do not require the security of a closed prison.

Zone 2 is a specific area of the community within a given short radius of the prison where serving prisoners living in zone 3 may have supervised work / training / education places.

Zone 3 is a residential area belonging to the prison where prisoners live in small groups (up to 5) with volunteer host families.  In the Stuttgart project, families commit to the project for a set period of time (18 months, 2 years, etc.) and move into the accommodation for that period.  Most of the families have young children.

The regime is strict in terms of domestic routine and includes household chores, family mealtimes and family days out.  Prisoners do a six-day week – usually 3 days work, 3 days college.  The head of the host family continues in his own employment as he would normally.

The day starts with “Community Focus” led by family/staff member or one of the prisoners.  Attendance is mandatory for all.  A strong group of adult volunteers based in the local churches visit 3 evenings per week and act as friends/supporters to the prisoners.  Prisoners may eventually be able to visit their volunteers at home as trust and progress develops.

A number of students from Germany and overseas join the programme to act as advisors and friends during their ‘gap year’. Experienced prisoners on the programme are selected to mentor those who are new to it.

All prisoners volunteer for the programme which lasts for a minimum of 1 year.  The rules are upheld strictly and infringement may result in some men being returned to the main prison. Prisoners also have the option to request a return.  The project at Stuttgart boasts a record of only 7 absconds over the 7-year life of the scheme.

Zone 4 represents a closed prison.  This would be modeled on the Academy Prison design both to improve regime delivery and reduce construction cost. Some of the prisoners housed with host families might spend their core day in work or education programmes inside the prison when those programmes best suit their needs.

The biggest departure from convention in the Cornish model is the integration of family living accommodation units with the closed prison.  Several options exist.  The ‘housing’ could be fully within the prison perimeter or entirely outside it.  It could be within a lower security part of the establishment or it could be an integral part of the perimeter security, facing outwards.  Such considerations would depend on the size and location of a site for the prison and if the prison is new build or conversion of existing buildings.  There are two old MoD sites in the county worthy of enquiry and one is actually seeking consultation with the public about possible alternative uses.

However, the principle shaper of this prison will be the prisoner demographic.

Incentivised Funding

Assuming a 250-bed prison facility is established in the county of Cornwall, this would relieve the overcrowded prison system in the rest of England and Wales (i.e. lessen the demand for additional prisoner places) by 250.  The cost of those 250 places (say, £30k per prisoner per year) would ‘follow the prisoners’ and bring funding of £7.5M for the operating cost of the Cornwall prison.  However, this funding would not go directly to the prison but to the councils within the county who, in turn, would be responsible for funding the prison places they use6.  If/ when the demand for prisoner places reduced (which is confidently anticipated) the size and overall operating cost of the prison would decrease leaving the councils with a surplus to spend on measures that they identify as contributors to reducing crime and building healthier communities – education, youth work, employment and training, addiction, mental health, family support services, policing, etc.

Over time, the total ‘cost of crime’ in the county would reduce significantly benefiting the wider economy.

Feasibility Study

The next step is to explore potential sites and gather detailed offender information so that the project can progress from ‘concept’ to outline designs and estimated costs/ funding models.

The statistical information required (offender profiles) should be readily obtainable from NOMS and of manageable scale, since it concerns primarily the age, gender, offence and sentence details of (about) 350 serving prisoners from the county of Cornwall.

This information would be sufficient to determine a feasible starting point (required capacity) for each of the conceptual ‘zones’ and to determine future reducing capacity requirements based on predictions of successful rehabilitation, over the next 5 to 10 years.

  1. Breakthrough Britain: Locked Up Potential. A Strategy for reforming Prisons and Rehabilitating Offenders. The Centre for Social Justice, 2009
  2. Stuart J Mitson is a former prison governor and private sector prison director who later worked in the UK and overseas on prison design, construct and manage projects.  Mitson now works through his own company, Mitson Consulting Ltd., providing integrated architectural and regimes solutions for the design of prisons and other custodial facilities.  He was a Member of the CSJ’s Prison Reform Working Group and contributor to Locked Up Potential, op. cit.
  3. Ellis and Shalev, University of Portsmouth. An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Kainos Community ‘Challenge to Change’ programme.
  4. Carpenter’s House Prison Project plans to re-visit Stuttgart before the end of 2010 in order to gather more detailed information, in particular, about how the ‘host families’ are found, trained and supported (including financially) and what responsibilities they have.
  5. Jonathan Aitken.  Op cit.
  6. Pricing mechanisms based on a similar principle (banding) are already used in the private prison sector.
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