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/" href="http://www.prisonsasia.com/">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

With recent announcement of MoJ spending cut on new prison planning and £1.3 billion capital investment in redevelopment of existing prisons, the UK Prison Construction Industry is due to go through radical reform to emphasize on prisoner rehabilitation and shift to redevelopment. To address this, Construction IQ has confirmed the latest speaker faculty and agenda for the Prison Planning, Design and Development 2010 conference, taking place 7th – 8th December 2010 at Kingsway Hall Hotel, London.

Keynoted speakers confirmed include Terry Stocks, Head of Construction Delivery, Ministry of Justice and Nicola Lowitt, Head of Strategy and Programme, National Offender Management Service.Mr. Stocks will be leading a session presenting a lean thinking construction philosophy to support and maintain accurate scheduling and reduce cost in the current construction environment. Ms. Lowitt, leads on national strategy for prison and probation estates, will follow up the government insight into the future custodial industry, analyse current working prisons and prospective outlook for prisons as well as drive forward the rehabilitating.

The entire agenda revolves around prison planning, design and development for rehabilitation and sustainability, and the event provides a platform for discussing:

• Innovative prefabrication to reduce prison cost and construction time• Design plans that facilitate rehabilitation and the leading the market updates

• Proposed changes to the BREEAM Assessment in environmental standards and the impacts on construction companies

• Planning best practice to avoid onsite oversights

Terry Stocks and Nicola Lowitt will be joined by the rest of the speaker faculty, which includes:

• Sian James, Member of Parliament – Justice Committee, House of Parliament

• Martin Townsend, Director, BREEAM

• Andreas Alexiou, Association Director of Architecture, TPS Consult

• Hunter Hardy, Architecture Department Director, W.R. Dunn & Co Ltd

• Frazer Bufton, Director of Architecture, HLN Architects • Hunter Hardy, Architectural Department Director, W.R. Dunn & Co Ltd

For further details on the conference and additional relevant content, please view the event agenda at http://www.prisonplanninganddevelopment.com.

Prison and Prison System Design has partnered with the Prison Planning, Design and Development 2010 conference, and is pleased to offer all the forum members a 20% discount off the standard pricing.

Please contact Yun Shi at yun.shi@iqpc.co.uk or +44(0)20 7368 9574 if you would like to take advantage of this discount code. Be sure to mention discount code IGC_DIS_PPSD_#2. BUPA.

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 elsewhere^{1, 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.

1. Breakthrough Britain: Locked Up Potential.  The Centre for Social Justice, 2009.
2. 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.

Can a greater awareness of the long-term consequences conviction, rather than the short term experience of prison, help enhance the deterrence value of the criminal justice system?

Young people inherently do not understand how long their lives are or how today’s bad decisions can leave a legacy or limitations and restrictions they may have to live with for the rest of their lives.

For a young person a year in prison does not seem like a particularly big deal especially if they have no dependants, no real financial ties and are not employed therefore, young people may benefit from understanding the long term and potentially very unglamorous effects of conviction.

For the improvement of the deterrence effect Prisons have there may be benefit for an understanding of the Criminal Justice System to be taught as part of the school curriculum.

This education may benefit from have some focus on the longer term effects of being convicted, from struggling to find understanding employers, access to loans or mortgages, insurance for everything from car to holiday insurance, finding a partner and telling their children and other potentially serious and limiting effects that can stick with them for the rest of their lives.

This could also help to reduce the social stigma against ex-offenders.

For many people a spell inside prison is enough to stop them committing further crime but for others this is not the case; research has shown that over 65% of prisoners re-offend within two years of release¹⁶ suggesting that prison is only effective for one third of the people who pass through their gates.

The deterrent value of the criminal justice system generally works well. This effectiveness can be starkly illustrated in areas throughout the world where societal breakdown and lawlessness greatly reduce the likelihood of crime leading to punishment. Sadly, in such environments, the level of crime often increases sharply and is often embodied with increases in theft, extreme violence and crimes of an extreme sexual nature.

The deterrence prison provides is also effective for many people where a spell in prison, the social stigma this entails, the affects on their personal and professional lives and the experience of prison itself is enough to deter them from committing crime in the first place or to prevent recidivism after release.

It is clear however, that Deterrence Theory does not hold true for a large percentage of prisoners and there are a variety of reasons why:

• Deterrence Theory assumes people are able to make rational decisions about whether they commit a crime or not

• Prison fails to help facilitate the changes in an prisoners life or attitude to prevent them from returning to criminal activity

• Prisoners can leave in a worse, more vulnerable situation, than when they started their sentence

• Some people feel that they are better off inside prison
• For some people the social stigma of prisons may be nonexistent, going to prison may be seen as a positive event or a rite of passage

It is for the these reasons why the system described in this document looks to retain deterrent factors of prison life while maximising the potential for rehabilitation and a reduction in reoffending.

“Prison? It’s not too hard.” – FD, Prisoner, on remand, after third term in prison.

This perception is obviously damaging and politicians need to remember that just because a Prison is progressive or different it does not mean that it cannot also be designed to be acceptable or well received by the voter.

On top of this Politicians need to remember that the build cost is dwarfed by the use-cycle of a prison which is in-turn dwarfed by the cost of a 77% reoffending rate.

The following diagram sums up the basics.

Politically speaking, secure imprisonment for a period of time is protecting the public from the prisoner, however, the protection it actually provides is merely a short-term side effect if nothing is done to reduce the chance of future offending. An offender locked up for five years protects the public for five years only, prisons should look to also protect the public for the remaining decades of the offenders life.

There is frequent outrage against the state from the victims and the press when a prisoner released early commits further crime; but it is seemingly more acceptable if a prisoner reoffends if they have served a full sentence – clearly a mindset that strongly pushes the government towards a poor set of priorities.

Politicians, journalists and victims need to push the case for the long term protection from criminal behavior; secure imprisonment on it’s own does not protect the pubic.