Introduction

The Handbook on Prison Design is intended to offer insights into the construction of custodial facilities, alongside consideration of the critical questions any policymaker should ask in commissioning the building of a site for human containment. Chief among these questions is the one we almost chose as the title of this volume: What Works in Prison Design? This proved the central—and thorny—question with which so many of the authors grappled. Its simplicity is deceiving. Yet centring this foundational concern caused many of us to return to basic questions about the nature, purpose, and outcomes of punishment. As a result, the Handbook is a testament to what can be achieved if we discard historical blueprints and abandon old ideas about what prisons are supposed to look like in favour of a more imaginative and humane response to people in prison—a consideration of what these facilities should look like. The question of ‘what works’ is not a bad one because it forces us to think about all the well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) architectural experiments that have been tried over the last two centuries, and the pros and cons of different configurations of carceral space.