In a session that will be discussed at the Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012 conference. Chief Executive, for the SA Corrective Services, in Australia speaks about the latest trends in prison design and construction to improve rehabilitation for Australia

Could you please outline the latest trends in prison design and construction that can improve rehabilitation in Australia?

Peter Severin:  Australia has in all our states and territories that are engaged in quite significant prison construction programs and actually, the designs tend to improve from one another, meaning that every new design learns from what others have done in the past.  You can categorize in general terms the design styles into three categories within prison environment; one being a high-security environment and medium security environment and the low security environment, and within those different security rate and construction types, the difference of construction is both building fabric but most importantly, the access that prisoners have to activities and other things that are offered to them in prison without supervision.

So in a high-security environment, you have a very high level of supervision and control and so prisoner’s specific programs and work are very much strongly controlled, both by way of the way the units or the accommodation areas are configured and also the way the staff operate in the other end of the spectrum, in a low-security environment, you may have very small living units without direct staff supervision.  You have a very much self-determined regime where prisoners can even do their own cooking, where they learn together in smaller living units, ready for their release into the community.  So just to summarize that contemporary good practice prison design is one that provides for the high level of interaction between staff and prisoners, and that is what is called or referred to as dynamic security, but of course, within high security being more controlled, low security being very little control and medium security somewhere in the middle.

What is important in a construction context is to achieve two objectives:  One is to have an efficient design which makes it easier for staff to supervise prisoners and another one, to have one that allows prisoners to access, both being set to make a difference in their lives like programs, work, education, and sports and recreation.  Ideally, from a master plan, if you design a new prison, you have all of those elements incorporated into your design plan, make sure it is staff sufficient, make sure the areas are located in such a way that they can easily be accessed from the cell blocks, the accommodation areas.

When it comes to the latest developments in prison design and construction in Australia, what are some of the challenges to moving away from prisons and moving towards rehabilitation centers?

Peter Severin:  The first challenge is that you really have to have a very robust assessment, so you need to assess prisoners before they are placed in accommodation areas so you know what the risks are, and of course, one of the biggest challenges in private prison system is the contraband that comes into a prison — the things that should not be there but they make their way into the prison such as drugs and other things you do not want to have there, that also of course is counterproductive to good rehabilitation.  So the answer to that is to have what we call a really strong access control.  There is a lot of technology in that.  We use x-ray machines, we use drug detection devices and we use metal detection etcetera, and it is not because we do not trust people who come into prison to visit, but because we want to make sure that we eliminate contrabands from coming in. 

Once you have an environment that we control new access role, you can actually be a lot freer inside your prison than you otherwise can.  So we try to have very solid surroundings in prisons and then inside, we can actually offer a lot more rehabilitation and a lot more opportunities for prisoners to change.

When examining the challenges that involve incorporating good prison design and to facilitate better rehabilitation for inmates, what are some of the costs and expertise issues that need to be taken into account?

Peter Severin:  It is always advisable within your design teams to have a mixture of different experts and forming your architects, so you need to have staffs that are clearly coming from a very strong security background, but you also need people who actually know how rehabilitation works and how we can actually make a design so that it actually is friendly but at the same time, secure so that it allows people to access programs and access activities easily in a safe way, but to make sure that they can access as many of those as possible.

So in my experience and right across Australia certainly, the experience has been that we have a multidisciplinary team approach to good prison design, and we also involve our existing staff and that because they with the experience can contribute a lot to good design as well even though they may not be design experts, but they can certainly can form a good design and it is really that multidisciplinary team that ends up giving us what we consider a really good prison design is all about, and what I mentioned earlier — the fact that you need to have different levels of control.  You need to give people a chance.  You need to give people an opportunity to progress through lower levels of security before they get back into the community, so it is normalizing that whole prison process.  But it also works as an incentive.

Prisoners in high security, they can see that there is a large security waiting for them, so they the right thing.  If they do the programs, if they behave well, they end up in a much better or less controlled environment before they get back into the community, but it is also responsible to the community to make sure that prisoners do not get hardly institutionalized, meaning that they only can operate along a very institutionalized daily regime, but they take some responsibilities for their own lives and that they learn alternative ways of making decisions and living their life and practice some of that even while they are still in prison before they get back into the community.

In your opinion, what are some of the difficulties when it comes to discussing the latest strategies, and what are some of the more innovative designs utilized to overcome these challenges?

Peter Severin:  The discussion that you have to have of course is always one where the community often does not understand not because they are ignorant, but because prisoners generally are sort of behind walls and one does not really know what is happening, that a prison is nothing more than a big institution, it is almost like a big hospital or a school where you have people.  The only difference is they are not there because they want to be, they are there because they have done something wrong and they need to be there and that is why you have security around them.  But within the institution themselves within the prisons, it is like a small community and so you need to organize the prison life around that community living its role.  And so the challenge is to convince the community and to convince of course the financing or the treasury departments of our countries and states to fund this infrastructure.  It is often not popular to fund new prison infrastructure and a prison infrastructure is an expensive infrastructure because there is a lot of electronics, there is a lot of very expensive building material that needs to be used, and so the challenge is to convince the community that if we manage a prison system well, you have less prisoners come back to prisons.

You will have more prisoners not reoffending, not committing further crimes because we will attach the means that prisoners learn different ways of living their life and not engaging in criminal behavior, and that means that overall, in a long term, the cost to the government and to the community will actually be a lot less if we have less prisoners coming to prison.

Could you please highlight the importance of complimenting good prison design with the latest security technology, training, and management?

Peter Severin:  It is very important that our prisons utilize technology wherever possible, particularly in areas where otherwise staff will do nothing but just watch things happening and not interacting with prisoners.  For example, perimeter security, it needs to be entirely driven by electronic security, both in terms of observation through cameras and also the barriers that we have with our various alarm systems etcetera, likewise inside a prison, you use a lot of electronic security to open and close doors, and also, you take away the need for staff to carry keys as the keys can be taken away from staff.  It is a smart way of using technology in a way that compliments the operation without the prison becoming an electronic zoo, without the prison becoming completely a personal type of environment.

We are always looking for the latest developments in technology and we are utilizing that technology almost always the latest version of it.  We use biometrics technology to do a better identification through iris scanning or fingerprinting, so we know who is coming to our prisons to visit, and we obviously use CCTV camera so that is really just a very important way to compliment the way we operate our prison is to utilize technology.  A good prison design organizes technology in the way that it is not immediately visible.  It is there but it is not so impacting on the operation of the prison that people feel alarmed by it, but nevertheless, a good prison is also one that control rooms in your part of the prisoners, in control of all the things that happen within your prison perimeter.

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Peter will be Outlining the Latest Trends in Prison Design and Construction to Improve Rehabilitation at  Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012.

Email enquiry@iqpc.com.sg to register for the congress or visit http://www.prisonsasia.com for the complete list of speakers and topics that will be discussed at the Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012.

]]> http://prisondesign.org/2012/04/29/peter-severin-on-the-latest-trends-in-prison-design-construction-rehabilitation/feed/ 1 Nathan Murphy peter-severin http://prisondesign.org/2012/04/24/an-interview-with-gaudencio-pangilinan-on-rehabilitation-in-prisons/ http://prisondesign.org/2012/04/24/an-interview-with-gaudencio-pangilinan-on-rehabilitation-in-prisons/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:42:52 +0000 Nathan Murphy http://prisondesign.org/?p=549 ]]>

Gaudencio Pangilinan, National Director for the Philippines Bureau of Corrections, highlight the difference between reformation, reformative and restorative justice and what stance does the Philippines taking with regards to both. He also talks about current trends in prison design and construction in the Philippines.

Could you please highlight the difference between reformation, rehabilitation and restorative justice and what stance does the Philippines taking with regards to both?

Gaudencio Pangilinan: You must be referring to Reformative Justice and Restorative Justice.  We all know that in the olden times, our elders mind frame was not as humanized compared to what it is today.  Remember how ICRC came about.  Punitive justice by international standards can be considered contrary to the edicts of the declaration of human rights.  We know that historically, neither punitive justice nor execution reduced crimes.  Other advocates believe that as more laws are passed with corresponding punishments, the chances of convicting the wrong persons also become higher.  Likewise, as the number of prisoners increase, it follows that by proportion those wrongly incarcerated.  We don’t have the exact statistics on how many convicted criminals eventually were acquitted after review.  Perhaps that will be a good research topic.  Someone has to determine the extent of imperfections in our justice systems.  The occurrence of crimes is a social issue and must be seen not purely from the legal perspective.

I believe that as many as 90 per cent of those incarcerated while guilty were simply at the wrong time and place at the time of the crime.  Most crimes happened out of passion, bad temper, desperate needs, or even weak moral upbringing.  Consider too the environment where the convict grew up.  Less than 10 percent of our convicts can be considered career criminals.  The stigma of prison to majority of the public will not change overnight, but we can change the attitude of those who came from prison.  We can orient them to be more discerning in their actions.  We can strengthen their tolerance to the endless contradictions in society.

We have all the tools to help insure that this fellow who would soon rejoin society as a free man is less likely to be in conflict with the law.  That I believe is the essence of Reformative Justice.  As I often mention in my lectures, safekeeping is only incidental to reformation.  The law may be too harsh in many forms, but it is still the law.  Society needs a benchmark in order to move forward.  Other advance societies have progressed to a level that the law supplements the social norms and not the other way around.

Restorative Justice while new in our system is but a level higher to that Reformative Justice.  It promotes that reformation is not enough to stop the vicious social cycle of crimes and punishment. It advocates that somewhere sometime we need to provide closure to the conflict caused by crimes, not only to the offended and the offender but also to the community.  There are yet sub-cultures in Philippine Society where aggression of a family to another are carried for endless generations.  The aggression may not always be through violence but a lot of times in forms of simple deprivations to the other party’s family members.

The community plays the central role in Restorative Justice.  Philippine Criminal Justice System started experimenting on the community approach to forward the principles of Restorative Justice.  In most cases we find it difficult for the families of the offender to accept an ex-convict albeit the crime was committed against their own family member.  Some sub-cultures simply cannot accept that among them is an ex-convict.  On the other hand, we have communities which are used to having ex-convicts around and where there is work and plenty of opportunity for normal life.  Philippine Criminal Justice System wishes to establish more of these communities as a step towards Restorative Justice.  There were also experiments where families of offended and offender are brought in for sessions.  This is also not an easy endeavour, we need to find and train more people on mediation.

In your experience, how can gathering all the stakeholders for transparency improve restorative justice efforts in the Philippines prison system?

Gaudencio Pangilinan: As I have mentioned this is not an easy task.  The mediator has to be an expert to avoid aggravating the conflict.  This happens in less educated communities. If what you mean by transparency is about massive information campaign to promote understanding on the importance and procedures of Restorative Justice, then that should be the first step.  Stakeholders must first understand what is in front of them, then that it is a step closer to make our society a better place to live in.

Transparency on the other hand is to engage stakeholders to show them that there is more good than bad that happens inside every prison.

A great part of our ten-year Strategic Plan or Road Map is strategic communications to engage the stakeholders.  We invite visitors and reach out to the public if only show the relevance of the corrections system to society.  It is also a medium to change the impression that the corrections system is as bad as the inmates.  Here in the Philippines both jails and prisons are favourite subjects of controversies, in my six and a half year tour of duty, this was among my biggest concern.  Reformation becomes difficult if majority of the public rejects our inmates and ex-convicts.  Transparency at the same time provides the stakeholders a higher recognition of the problem besetting the prisons.  It is in recognition where viable solution starts.

The Philippines has a unique practice of visitation of inmates’ dormitories is this a security risk or a beneficial rehabilitation process?

Gaudencio Pangilinan: We are perhaps the only prison in the world which allows the visitors to join the inmates at their dormitories during visiting hours.  This affords the inmate precious opportunities to be with their families even for short periods of time.  As they remain connected with their families, the chances of reformation become better.  It has also effectively prevented prison violence. The last major disturbance in our NBP maximum security compound, which is the biggest so far in the Philippines, was 12 years ago.  Last story of escape was more than 10 years ago.  For so long now after this unique visitation system was implemented, no major disturbance was recorded.  As the inmates are exposed to the visitors and public as well, they intuitively learn to respect each other’s privacy and needs.  This behaviour contributes to behavioural modification which is among the six pillars of reformation.

Indeed, this takes a heavy toll on the security system.  Visitors can reach up to 4,000 in a day.  Processing and screening them takes hundreds of people even with IT assistance.  That is yet a small price to pay considering its contribution to reformation.

What are some of the current trends in prison design and construction in the Philippines?

Gaudencio Pangilinan: That is a very timely question. We are at present planning for building a 20,000 capacity prison.  Primary considerations are:

• To decongest present facilities.

• Locations of new prisons should be accessible to the majority of inmates’ relatives in order to keep the inmates connected to their families in support of reformation. Transportation expenses to and from the new prison sites should be reasonably affordable.

• Accommodate projected increase of inmate population for the next five years.  New prisons must include facilities for female inmates.

• Design of the new prisons shall focus on enhancing inmate reformation program (“humane, decent, secure, and drug free inmate environment”).

• Security implications both to the facility and to the immediate community.

Actual design will depend largely on capacity of my government to finance the project.  Also we cannot afford to compete with other priorities of spending. Nevertheless, the design takes heavy consideration on how much restraint is enough.  Neither too loose at the expense of safekeeping nor too restrictive that it impacts on reformation.

Whatever the design will be, it must take on the philosophy that the incarcerated humanity is not only a huge responsibility to society but also a great challenge to one’s faith. We try our best to show that social change is possible.  We start on reforming prison system, ridding it with corruption, drugs, apathy, and mismanagement.

The Philippines prisons achieved worldwide recognition with the Cebu Dancing Inmates version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, what were some of the benefits of that project?

Gaudencio Pangilinan: That is a very small nip in the bud, more significant things happen are known to many.  The project provided a good diversion for the inmates.  It did give them additional income as tourist get to pay to see the show.  The inmates get their share.  Their share is deposited to the individual inmates account.  The benefits are endless.  We also have similar endeavours like the college guild, as they sing inspiring music; they get to internalize the beauty of life.  Participants get to stay in less crowded dormitories and are accorded privileges to perform outside the prisons.  It is a great encouragement to many.

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Gaudencio Pangilinan, will be sharing his experience of rehabilitation in the Philippines at Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012. Email enquiry@iqpc.com.sg to register for the congress or visit http://www.projectmanagementcongress.com for the complete list of speakers and topics that will be discussed at the Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012.

In conjunction with IQPC Worldwide, the Prison Department of Malaysia will be launching the 2^nd Annual Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012 in Kuala Lumpur on 22^nd and 23^rd May 2012. The conference brings together international and regional prison commissioners, senior prison officials and key industry stakeholders to discuss the challenges and strategies to enhance prison design, management, operations and security for prisons and correctional facilities in Asia.

Providing the keynote address at the conference is Datuk Wira Hj. Zulkifli, Commissioner General of the Prison Department of Malaysia—who will be touching on prison overcrowding and the effective strategies that his department has implemented. Datuk Wira will be joined by an impressive speaker panel—including the prison commissioners from Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, the Philippines and Malawi.

Following last year’s success, Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012 promises to be a high-quality, inter-governmental and industry summit, where international best practices, standards and security technologies will be discussed. When asked about the challenges and strategies in designing effective rehabilitation centres instead of ‘prisons’ in South Australia, Mr. Peter Severin, Chief Executive of the South Australia Corrective Services replied, “The answer to that is to have what we call a really strong access control.  There is a lot of technology in that.  We use x-ray machines, we use drug detection devices and we use metal detection etcetera, and it is not because we do not trust people who come into prison to visit, but because we want to make sure that we eliminate contrabands from coming in.  Once you have an environment that we control new access roles, you can actually be a lot freer inside your prison than you otherwise can.  So we try to have very solid surroundings in prisons and then inside, we can actually offer a lot more rehabilitation and a lot more opportunities for prisoners to change.”

In addition, the Prison Department of Malaysia will be organizing a post-conference a field trip to their latest state-of-the-art correctional facility at Sungai Udang, Malacca, as part of the programme. Visitors will be able to have a first-hand experience of Malaysia’s latest ESS system at Sungai Udang, and interact with the prison staff and inmates.

Visit http://www.prisonsasia.com for more information on this event.

Purwo Ardoko, Chief Architect for the Cipinang Penitentiary in East Jakarta, which can house up to 256 inmates, convicted of graft and an attendee of the Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2011 tells us what he gained from attending the conference. He also tells us how prisons are evolving and how this

Bryan Camoens: Could you please tell us what the difficulties in prisons and correctional facilities
today are?

Purwo Ardoko: coming from non-technical issues like budgeting and programming. (Authorization by the government which is very limited on preparing the
budget, lands/location and time scheduling) Almost all of my work spent over the past 3 years has been to design and build those prison and correctional facilities.

Also capacity prediction, (because no one can predict the result of the justice system as statistically the numbers of inmates is vital data for me). Lastly understanding and implementing precisely the prison and correctional facilities standard among stakeholders (owners and architects) according to standard
minimum rules for the treatment of prisoner by UN Resolution is different measurement within different countries.

Bryan Camoens: How did attending the Prisons & Correctional Facilities Asia 2011 conference help you to overcome these issues?

Purwo Ardoko: Of course the conference by IQPC held last year in Malaysia was very useful and beneficial for me and the team who attended, as you know we had 8 people attend as delegates. Two of which were engineers and the rest are prison and correctional officer that have no – or limited – knowledge
and experience in the engineering background. So at the conference we learnt and saw how other  countries have similar issues and go about solve these problems. In design terms, it was as an observatory  phase for me.

Bryan Camoens: From an architect’s perspective what led you to signing up for the Prisons &  Correctional Facilities Asia 2011 conference?

Purwo Ardoko: From an architect’s perspective, we found some reference in prison and correctional  facilities design according those contradictory design in prison and correctional design. The health, convenience, comfort, accessibility, environment design, etc. – design category and standard in  architecture – versus security systems, space and access limitation, 24 hours building usage, etc. (reserve  for prevent escape, disciplines and others prison and correctional facility purpose), that’s in itself is very
challenging.

Bryan Camoens: In your opinion how are prisons evolving and how will the design of these facilities help spur rehabilitation of these individuals?

Purwo Ardoko: Prisons are evolving and design will only help to spur rehabilitation of the inmate.  Although there is not much research with regard to the relationship between the building and users for the influences in their life (except in technical function). There is no guarantee for those individuals who came to prison and correctional facilities to spend their sentence in many variety years that will be rehabilitated and not to repeat to commit the crime again in any further yet in very good prison and correctional facilities. For those fact and history, many government have tried to change the idiom of prison to correctional which mean more humanized
approach system than prison as Tools of Criminal Justice System, this is are evolvement.This means the individuals coming to prison are people who have a life balance problem and they should solve the problem in a certain time and place (sentence) by law not by them.

Our job as an architect through design is to prepare facilities according their requirements (As we Live) only limited by the government. The difference of prison and correctional facilities and other facilities are (common): The
fence (tall and tough), the doors (many and open just from outside), the details, the access, the neighbourhood, the limit of right (everything is limited, even the human right needs: seeing the sky, the stars, the air, etc.).

Finally, according to those conditions, I, as an architect must have self confidence that the prison and correctional facility design should have a capability to spur rehabilitation with appropriate design as we live (providing proper prison and correctional facilities is not just providing the ideal prison and correctional facility design), then the spur of rehabilitation is no a longer purpose but balancing the inmate problem on limited facilities to make them as a subject, not an object, together we can (officer and inmate) solve the problem (reintegration program) as the Indonesian correctional system does (statisticallyrecidivism is 0.00001 % in the past 12 years) although we have overcapacity issues and a ratio of 1 officer by 100 inmate (normally 1:6).

The 2nd annual Prisons and Correctional Facilities 2012 conference once again brings together senior international and regional Prison Commissioners, Director Generals and senior officials to discuss the latest trends, issues, challenges and strategies involving the construction, design, security and rehabilitation programmes within prisons and correctional facilities. Email enquiry@iqpc.com.sg to register for Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia 2012.

It is clear that before this work was done that this corridor was pretty drab and foreboding; it is good to see Prison’s embracing creativity and embedding it within prisons.

Visitor access has to be underground by law in newly constructed prisons in Germany. This tunnel covers the 40m (about 132 feet) between the security check in the front building and the visitors area in one of the inner prison buildings. Concept for the installation was to create a 3 dimensional painting that follows and surrounds the visitor during the walk through the tunnel. Two sets of diagonal stripes that both grow wider while covering the distance build two different perspectives.

Born in Germany, Linnenbrink now lives and works in Brooklyn. You can see many more of his paintings, sculptures and installations on his website. 

Following the fantastically successful conference last year the annual Prisons and Correctional Facilities 2012 conference once again brings together senior international and regional Prison Commissioners, Director Generals and senior officials to discuss the latest trends, issues, challenges and strategies involving the construction, design, security and rehabilitation programmes within prisons and correctional facilities.

The Prisons and Correctional Facilities Asia conference is the only dedicated conference for prison design, construction and security – and if you are in the region it is well worth attending – not only for the leanings that can be gained but the contacts and networking can prove invaluable.

Software tools abound for law enforcement agencies looking to streamline their records management and create savings in annual budgets, but without the right tools, a software suite can’t deliver the functionality needed. The best features help you to prioritize and protect relevant information and make it simple to access. These advanced features should be part of any law enforcement software suite for managing and accessing public safety records.

Enhanced Features for Law Enforcement Software

Mobile Data Access: When officers can access records and relevant data in the field through an encrypted connection to your public safety system, you’ve given them a truly powerful law enforcement tool: information. The ability to access critical records, images, and dispatch data from the field helps officers safely and effectively serve their communities.

Workflow Tracking: A public safety software system should allow your agency to track the history of records and reports from beginning to end. Your system should make it easy to set up approval procedures and requirements for a whole range of reports and documents, allowing you to customize their movement through your unique organizational structure.

Document Flagging: Part of protecting the integrity of data is properly classifying documents. Information about juvenile records or ongoing investigations may need to be flagged differently from general information that can be distributed to the press and the public. Look for a police records management system that enables you to set administrative privileges to prevent unauthorized personnel from viewing sensitive material.

Robust Reporting: The beauty of automated law enforcement software is the ability it gives users to collect and analyze data. The best programs will give you preformatted crime reports to analyze crime rates and patterns over time. Formatting documents and data for transmission to statewide and national databases eliminates hundreds of hours of work, potentially saving thousands of labor dollars in your annual budget.

Centralized Data: Duplicate files are a significant problem for many databases, but duplicate police records can prevent law enforcement from accessing all available information about a specific file, case, or individual. If your software draws from a single centralized database that links related files together, it’s less likely that relevant information will be lost, overlooked, or deleted.

Simple Imaging: Your public safety software system should allow you to create a searchable library of full-color image files. Choose software that enables you to easily capture and edit mug shots, accident photos, and crime scene images so they can be attached to the appropriate record. Your system should also allow you to attach multiple files to a single record.

License Monitoring: A robust system can let you manage and monitor animal licenses, weapon permits, and more. You can then enter, sort and search for permits by name, expiration date, or city. A system should allow you to link license files to related records and easily track information about each permit, including expiration dates, fees, payments, and adjustments.

Facilities Management: Correctional facilities require a lot of work to keep them running efficiently. From the command staff and booking procedures to housing, commissary and IT concerns, jail management systems should provide detailed analytics, important statistics, and comprehensive inmate histories to ensure that you can identify and reduce any disciplinary problems and share important information with other public safety officials.

Paperless operations: Electronic evidence tracking allows public safety agencies to simplify and streamline their record keeping. An effective system should allow you to track the location and status of evidence items and link evidence records to other related records within the system. In addition, a public safety software system should enable you to link digital files such as sound recordings, videos, and images to records.

About Lynze Lenio; Lynze Lenio works for Spillman Technologies and has been writing about public safety software for more than four years.

Justice Ministers Nick Herbert and Jonathan Djanogly witnessed first hand, the video-technology in action when they visited a police station in North Kent and a virtual court in Chester today.

Virtual courts allow a defendant, charged in a police station, to have their first hearing held over secure video link from the magistrates’ court. This can happen within hours of being charged and if the defendant pleads guilty, the court can often sentence on the same day.

The same equipment allows police witnesses to give evidence in court via the police station, an initiative known as ‘Live Links’, freeing up time to carry out frontline duties rather than travelling to and from court.

Nick Herbert, Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, said:

‘Live links are a key factor in making the criminal justice system in England and Wales more efficient – to enable justice agencies to work together to reduce waste and bureaucracy and provide a more integrated service.

‘Live links frees up valuable police time and resources to carry out their frontline duties and ensure crimes are dealt with more quickly and effectively. This is important not only for the local police force but for victims and witnesses.’

Courts Minister Jonathan Djanogly said:

‘The expansion of virtual courts clearly demonstrates the Government’s commitment to working with local police and the courts to ensure speedy and effective justice.

‘Not only do they enable the quick resolution of cases they also save time as defendants do not need to be transferred between prison and the court.’

The virtual courts initiative began in May 2009 in London (Camberwell Green) and Kent (Medway) and is now being extended this month to other locations in these areas as well as to Cheshire and Hertfordshire. Live links, which is currently in use in Kent, London and Hertfordshire is quickly expanding to other police force areas with Cheshire being the next area to implement the initiative.

The initiatives form part of a wider policy to digitalise, streamline and make the criminal justice system more efficient. By spring 2012, the entire criminal justice system is required to go digital, with secure electronic transfer of case files between the police, prosecutors and courts becoming the norm rather than the exception. In excess of 1400 people have appeared using the virtual court system in Kent. Live links was introduced in July and in the first 24 cases, more than 100 hours of police time have been saved.

The information, released on the Justice website, shows every sentence handed down at each court in the country between July 2010 and June 2011, along with the age and ethnicity of each offender. This will enable the public to see exactly what sentences are being handed down in their local courts and to compare different courts.

The figures have been published alongside the quarterly Criminal Justice statistics, which give a comprehensive overview of the Criminal Justice System.

Today’s publication is the latest in a series of moves to increase the justice system’s transparency.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke said:

‘Open justice is a long-standing and fundamental principle of our legal system. Justice must be done and must be seen to be done if it is to command public confidence.

‘Modern technology allows us to be more open. This Government has ambitious plans to increase transparency at every stage to allow everyone to see what is happening better and how the system works.’

Earlier this month easy to use online maps were published on the new ‘Making Sense of Criminal Justice’ website, where people can view information about sentencing and reoffending in their area and compare it with national trends.

Further moves planned to improve transparency include:

• Allowing broadcasting from courts for the first time – in September the Government announced its intention to change legislation to enable broadcasting in specific circumstances, starting at the Court of Appeal.
• Court-by-court statistics for the time taken for cases to be processed, from offence to conviction, allowing people to compare the performance of their local courts.
• Details on how many trials were ineffective and why they were ineffective.
• From next May providing justice outcomes and police actions on the national crime mapping website, Police.uk, so that people can see what happens next after crimes are committed on their streets.
• More information on the civil and family justice systems, including how long it takes each court to process small claims hearings, larger cases and care proceedings.

Chris Dredger scooped Talk Talk’s ‘Digital Heroes’ Award for working with charity Storybook Dads as an audio and video editor while serving time and has continued to work for them after his release.

The 30-year-old, who is still on probation with Devon and Cornwall Probation Trust, beat 11 other finalists to win the award.

He said: ’I feel very proud to have represented our charity. I hope that my success might show other prisoners there can be a way out of the cycle of crime and imprisonment’.

Sharon Berry, founder and Chief Executive of Storybook Dads, said:‘Chris has worked hard to promote our cause and having been a prisoner himself, he understands how it feels to be separated from your family’.

Chris worked for charity Storybook Dads for two years whilst in Dartmoor Prison, where the charity is based.

It helps imprisoned parents stay in touch with their children by sending CDs and DVDs of prisoners reading bedtime stories to their children, complete with sound effects and music.

The scheme started as an office in an empty cell in Dartmoor Prison and has now expanded to 100 prisons nationwide. More here.

The Ministry of Justice explains how our sentencing system works:

Magistrates and judges are independent of Government. Their sentencing decisions are based on the individual circumstances of each case and offender. That is why different offenders may be given different sentences for what might appear to be similar crimes.

To provide a consistent base for these decisions an independent body of experts, the Sentencing Council set guidelines for them to use. These provide a range of sentences that could be given for particular types of crime, including cases of theft, burglary or robbery .

Questions answered:

Do judges have to stick to sentencing guidelines?
When sentencing offenders, courts must follow relevant sentencing guidelines unless it would be contrary to the interests of justice to do so. So, if a judge or magistrate believes a guideline sentence doesn’t allow the interests of justice to be served, he or she can sentence outside of the guideline. In these cases, the judge or magistrate must always state the reasons for this in their sentencing remarks in open court .

What is the Sentencing Council?
The independent Sentencing Council is made up of judges and criminal justice professionals who have worked with victims and offenders. They draw up guidelines, following public consultation, on sentence lengths for different types of crime, helping the judiciary to achieve a consistent approach.

What is Government’s role?
It is Parliament’s role to specify what is a criminal offence and set the maximum penalties.
Some types of offending have been the same for centuries (for example murder) but others have changed, emerged or disappeared as new problems have surfaced, new technology has been developed and as society takes a more or less lenient view on certain actions.

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 a law abiding citizens.

For years, it is these first two functions of the architecture that has been fixated on by way of a one-size-fits-all approach regardless of gender or nationality. In the United States money earmarked for prisons is most undoubtedly used for more bars, more walls and more razor wire.

Due to privatization, new design innovations seem to center around efficiency. Larger and larger groups of prisoners are managed by increasing surveillance and security while decreasing staff. These efforts do little to change prisoner behavior or deter re-offending, as recidivism rates suggest. In fact, the prison program has been expanded to do just the opposite by accommodating spaces for torture or sensory deprivation as is the case with the much publicized American detention camp, Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.

It is also important to note that while the focus on prison containment and punishment is centered on the primary inhabitant, the inmate, the affect on those that work there as well as the families of the imprisoned is significant.

Prison architecture with a lopsided functional emphasis will adversely affect those that are neither the object of punishment or containment. As Society evolves, the design or our prisons remain in the dark ages. This is a problem. Gandhi has been paraphrased by many in his proclamation that, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” This statement is not lost on prisoners, who are considered by many to be animals. The Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa invokes the sentiment with his statement, “It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.” It is only by balancing these three functions that we may hope to make progress. Unfortunately the rehabilitation, or re-socialization, aspect of prison design is the one function that has been the least explored and often only in theory.

Two notable examples include Rem Koolhaas’ 1980 proposal for the Renovation of the Koepel Panopticon Prison in the Netherlands aimed at recouping “…the programmatic initiative that…has seemed the true ambition of modern architecture – an architecture that can support and provoke modern conditions”, and Will Alsop’s 2007 Creative Prison exhibition, a utopian prison which takes the form and structure of a university campus. American culture is full of references that discount the rehabilitative nature of prisons. Let us recount a scene from the 1994 blockbuster, Shawshank Redemption: 1967 Parole Hearings Man: Ellis Boyd Redding, your files say you’ve served 40 years of a life sentence. Do you feel you’ve been rehabilitated? Red: Rehabilitated? Well, now let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.

Halden Fengsel Prison

Thankfully new architecture experiments are taking place, primarily in Europe, in an effort to bridge this gap. The 252 million dollar Halden Prison completed last year in Norway, designed by Erik Moller Architects, includes amenities like a sound studio, jogging trails and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits. In Austria, the Leoben Prison designed by Joseph Hohensinn has been described as a sleek wood and glass structure that looks more like a university library, minus the razor wire.

Both pieces of architecture appear to be well crafted structures with modern aesthetics that would be right at home in any glossy architecture magazine. To most, they do not “look like prisons”. It is my belief that this is again due to the hegemonic inertia surrounding the first two of the three functions of a prison I outlined earlier. If there was more emphasis on rehabilitation, and resocialization, then isn’t the idea of these facilities appearing as university architecture is right in step with Mr. Sullivan’s proclamation?

Jeanne Woodford, a former warden of San Quentin Prison and the undersecretary of the California Department of Corrections Rehabilitation, poses and answers the question regarding the effectiveness of architecture on recividism.

“Can the architectural design of a prison or jail improve outcomes of evidencedbased programs? I believe the answer is yes..The challenge for architects will be to convey the benefit of appropriate design on recidivism reduction programs.” –Jeanne Woodford

Not only would the success of these experimental architectures mean decreasing recidivism, but increase interest from the architecture community at large and provide new models for prison design that will change lives. Pursuing architecture in this fashion, rather than an architecture of fashion, we can reinstate the power of it to make our society a better place.

You can get in touch with Chris here.

Bibliography:

Adams, William L. “Norway Builds The World’s Most Humane Prison.” http://www.time.com   Time Magazine, 10 May 2010. Web. 03 Apr. 2011.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html
Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Lewis, Jim. “Behind Bars…Sort Of.” http://www.nytimes.com  The New York Times, 14 June 2009. Web. 30 Mar. 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14prisons-t.html
McGray, Douglas. “Behind The Bars.” http://www.metropolismag.com. Metropolis Magazine, 17 July 2006. http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20060717/behind-the-bars
Toy, Sidney. “Chapter III: Fortifications of Greece and Rome, 300 B.C. to 200
B.C.” Castles: Their Construction and History. New York: Dover Publications, 1985. 22. Print.
Woodford, Jeanne. “The Future of Prison Design.” AAJ Journal (2007).
Newsletter of the Academy of Architecture for Justice. American Institute of Architects, 19 Jan. 2007. Web. 03 Apr. 2011. http://info.aia.org/nwsltr_caj.cfm?pagename=caj_a_20070119_prison
Halden Prison Homepage – http://www.haldenfengsel.no/
The Municipality of Leoben Homepage - http://www.leoben.at/English.351.0.html
Leoben Prison Homepage - http://strafvollzug.justiz.gv.at/einrichtungen/justizanstalten/justizanstalt.php?id=1
Josef Hohensinn Homepage – http://www.hohensinn-architektur.at/projekte.php
Prison and Prison System Design Blog Homepage – http://prisondesign.org/

Tihar Jail - Delhi, India

Tihar Jail’s move marks one in a series of innovations sweeping Asia’s prisons to address rapidly growing inmate populations, increasingly obsolete prison infrastructure and poor public opinion. A review of the latest innovations will be presented at the upcoming Prisons & Correctional Facilities Asia conference, where top government stakeholders from across Asia will be meeting with the prisons’ industry’s top executives.

Government officials from India, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Brunei, Fiji, Sri Lanka and many others will be discussing the top three challenges facing Asia’s prisons – rehabilitation, modernisation, and security concerns in a series of high-level dialogue sessions that will see 15 Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners sharing case studies on managing their respective countries’ prisons at the 24-25 May conference.

The private sector’s leading prison design experts, including Frazer Bufton, Director of Architecture at HLN ARCHITECTS will also be weighing in on the impact of design on the rehabilitation needs of inmates. Two technical workshops covering modernisation of prison facilities and design challenges, and a site tour to one of Kuala Lumpur’s biggest prison facilities have also been included in the comprehensive agenda.

This is the first time an industry-government meet is being held in Kuala Lumpur and the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA) is the latest in a series of global organisations to support and attend the event. The event will be attended and closely watched by heads and project leads of prisons, detention and correctional facilities, as well as security and construction consultants from Asia and around the world.

Visit http://www.prisonsasia.com to find out more.

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.

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