During the riots in Risley Prison, Warrington, which opened in 1964, people became trapped on landings. As Lyon says, some have poor sight lines, low ceilings, corridors and blind spots. Lyon says that there have been different stages in prison design, and those built in the 1960s through to the 1980s did focus on rehabilitation, creating spaces such as “communal living rooms”. “No wonder they're universities of crime.” Alsop recommended giving prisoners more agency: their own keys to cells, meaningful jobs, better education and mixed age groups – even allowing prisoners to paint their cells so as to achieve “a sense of place” – and his HMP Paterson concept (named after pre-war prison reformer, Alexander Paterson) mooted a landscape surrounded by buildings: library, sports facilities, recording studio.īleeding-heart accusations arrived (“They all came out with the 'holiday camp' line,” Alsop recalls) so he stuck them with the UK's high 62 per cent recidivist rate: “Schools should make you learn, hospitals should make you better, and prisons should help prisoners reform.” Alsop hasn't been asked to contribute a design for the nine new nicks and, according to Jewkes, will be unlikely to tender. “They bang up prisoners in these miserable places,” he says. Ten years ago, Alsop made a project with organisation Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation), a company that promotes the arts within the penal system, and found all manner of spirit-crushing detail: beds just 6ft long, lavatories in cells two feet away from the bed. But she is not optimistic, and nor is architect Will Alsop of aLL Design. Maybe the nine prisons-to-be will be akin to Jewkes' desire for an “architecture of hope”. In a recent paper, Designing Punishment: Balancing security, creativity and humanity in contemporary correctional systems, Jewkes wrote that “prisons send a clear message about punishment from the 'carefully scripted' construction of their façades” and that the new “bland, corporate-looking” prisons have no architect engagement with their “clients” or if you prefer, end users. But Yvonne Jewkes, professor of criminology at the University of Leicester, thinks that despite such humanising appurtenances, these edifices are more akin to the “Amazon warehouse” typology, hardly “cutting-edge architecture”, more a container model imported from the US: bland and technocratic, with a smell of fear and an assembly-line ethos.