Can a Prison Ever Feel Like Home? – with Professor Yvonne Jewkes

29:11Yvonne Jewkes:So I rationalise it, I intellectualise my vertigo. I think that there are reasons why sometimes when I stand at the top of the stairs at tube stations, you know, the floor sort of rushes up at me. Aside from that, I'm really aware of the way that architecture affects me. And I think, again, this is the genesis of my research and the book that I wrote. So I've worked at a number of universities where there's been quite a mixed economy of architecture. And I'm very aware at Hull University, for example, of the difference that I feel when I'm in the red brick Victorian building where, you know, all the management offices are compared to the sort of rather brutalist concrete tower that my office was in.

30:05Yvonne Jewkes:I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it's quite interesting. Actually, my last job was at the University of Bath. And I think a lot of people probably arrive at the University of Bath thinking that the campus is going to be all sort of honey-coloured Palisades or something. And it's not. It's a brutalist monument. It was, as you'll know, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and opened in 1966. I like it. You know, I like the brutalism. I think it's a bit unfortunate that it's been added onto in so many ways over the years. So So Smithson's original vision doesn't really make any sense now.

30:43Yvonne Jewkes:You know, it's sort of been bastardised. But, you know, I am aware of the sort of the effect that architecture has on me all the time. And I think environment matters, design matters. And that's why I started to wonder, how would it affect people in prison? I mentioned in An Architecture of Hope, the Irish poet and philosopher, John O'Donoghue, who in a conversation about urban planning said that he felt that the poor are doubly impoverished because of the ugliness that often surrounds them. He said it's very difficult to reach and sustain gentleness in such environments and that really spoke to me and spoke to me in relation to prisons.

31:31Yvonne Jewkes:Because I think if we take what are essentially already mostly very damaged people, and we put them in an environment that is ugly, bleak, brutal, barbaric, how can we expect them to be able to conjure up a different version of their lives? You know, how can they imagine a better future? And the converse is true as well, I think, you know, if we gave people in prison environments to invest in emotionally and to inspire, you know, they might be able to aspire to a different kind of future. That might sound a bit fanciful, but I do believe it. Yeah, I think this is so interesting, isn't it? And this is the kind of heart of your manifesto, as it were.

32:18And I'm sure some people will think, and you must come across this a lot, where people will push back on that and say, well, they've done bad things, so they don't deserve it. They don't deserve a pleasant environment. They don't deserve to be rehabilitated in that way. What would you say to that?

32:36Yvonne Jewkes:I've spent about 30 years in prisons. And, well, I know that the loss of liberty is everything. having your freedom taken away from you is all important. So to design spaces that add despair and degradation and alienation on top of that seems to me just a profoundly uncivilised thing to do. And I think if we want to think of ourselves as a civilised society, we really need to address this. And, you know, I rarely leave a prison without thinking there, but for the grace of God, go I or any of us. I truly believe that any of us could end up in prison or someone we love could. And then that immediately puts a very different complexion on things.

33:26Yvonne Jewkes:You know, what kinds of people do we want leaving prison? In Scandinavia, they take release very seriously because the vast majority of prisoners will come back out into society and their attitude is they will be our neighbours and who do we want as our neighbours you know I always say this who would we want sitting on the bus next to our daughter someone who's been further harmed and and brutalized by their environment or someone who has been rehabilitated and healed by their environment and feels that they have an investment in themselves and their future and and in society to me that kind of seems like a no no-brainer really absolutely Absolutely.

34:18If you were incarcerated yourself personally, how do you think you would deal with that? As someone who's described themselves as sensitive to environment, do you think you'd be able to get through it? What do you think? You've obviously immersed yourself in it quite a lot, so more than most, so you know what it means. What do you reckon?

34:40Yvonne Jewkes:hell is other people right you know i think it might be not being surrounded by other prisoners but just being surrounded by other people all the time i think i would find really difficult um i'd like to think that if i was imprisoned i would do something constructive with my time uh you know write a book uh they don't make that easy i mean you know as i am currently writing a book with a serving prisoner. He doesn't have a laptop or anything in prison. You know, his contributions to the book are written in pen in a notebook, which is a very, very slow, laborious process and frustrating for him.

35:22Yvonne Jewkes:For me, it would depend what prison I was in. So I think, in a way, I'm backtracking slightly on what I said, that loss of liberty is everything. I mean, I do believe that. But for me, the environment would make a difference. I think I could be wrong about that. You know, I've done a lot of research at Halden Prison in Norway, which is the prison that's universally held up as the model prison. Very expensive to build. It's very expensive to run. It's in many ways a beautiful environment. And the prisoners that I've spoken to there have said, yes, it's all very well. You know, it is lovely, nice, you know, architecturally and so on.

36:05Yvonne Jewkes:But unlike you, I can't walk out at five o 'clock. You know, I can't phone my kids whenever I want to. So to some extent, a prison is a prison is a prison. But I actually don't think you can imagine how you would cope with imprisonment until you face it. And I doubt I would do very well actually unless i could carve out that fertile solitude exactly that's the thing isn't it as you say it's the it's somehow the independence from the from the barrage that's going on around you as i would imagine is the hardest thing um you've mentioned that the scandinavian prisons as you say they are held up as better examples of prisons in terms of design yeah what do they do differently then I think the main thing they do differently is think about what happens when people are released, let back into society.

37:01Yvonne Jewkes:You know, all the things that make up a humane environment, a human environment, nature, nice landscapes, art, culture, education, contact with families. You know, all these small things that make a huge difference, they take seriously. and they have this principle of what is known as normalisation. So it's a given that prisons take away your freedom but the view is that they shouldn't inflict further punishment on top of that. So people go to prison as punishment, not for punishment. And so this is enshrined in law in many countries in Northern Europe that prisons should approximate normal conditions on the outside as far as possible.

37:57Yvonne Jewkes:So, for example, with a new prison, as with any civic building in Norway, for example, Denmark, wherever, 1 % of the capital build project has to be spent on art. So, you know, that can typically be£250 ,000 on a prison. Oh, wow. that makes a difference you know so I think that's that's probably the the main thing that kind of principle of normalization having said all that I'll return to my earlier point which is that you know Halden is a high security prison and if I was a male high security prisoner Of course, yes, I would much rather be at Halden than in Pentonville or Wormwood Scrubs or even Oslo Prison for that matter.

38:52Yvonne Jewkes:But I think there's a danger in over-romanticising Scandinavian prisons. And in fact, Nordic countries have taken quite significant steps back from the kind of humane environment that Halden is. And Bastoy, the island prison, is the other famous one in Norway. The prisons they're building now look much more like the kinds of prisons that we build in the UK. But actually, by far the worst prison that I've been in, the only prison that I've ever felt scared in, was Auckland Prison in New Zealand. I was engaged to advise on the design of a replacement to the Supermax Paramoremo, it was called. It was designed by an architect, an American Supermax architect.

39:41Yvonne Jewkes:It was designed on the same principles as many notorious American supermax prisons. What does that mean, supermax? Super maximum security. So not just maximum security, but a level above that. So typically thought of as housing the worst of the worst, kind of the end of the road. There was a wing called D-Wing, D-Unit, D-Block, I think, which was underground. it was literally subterranean and it held the supermax prisoners and it was a really scary environment and I was there with this group of architects and corrections people you know all in their sort of white starched shirts and ties and suits and we all felt quite green actually you know a bit naive sort of being there just the smells and the sounds it was like a movie it was like Silence of the Lambs, you know, that was the feeling that it conjured up.

40:39Yvonne Jewkes:Of course, all the guys there were locked up. There was no danger to us, but it felt like a really dangerous environment. And I left it thinking, what on earth does that do to your psyche for the people locked up in it and also working in it? It really did feel like hell. Well, you're describing a kind of an emotional energy in the place somehow, but it's also subterranean. But was there anything else about the design of it that was contributing to that? The darkness. There was obviously no natural light. It was a very harsh environment acoustically and visually. Absolutely no softness, no basic humanness, actually.

41:31Yvonne Jewkes:There were cages. These guys were locked up in cages. it's become a cliche to sort of say you know you wouldn't keep your dog in an environment like that but but you genuinely wouldn't it was horrible it's a scary thought isn't it it is and actually the prison that they've ended up with is is no better in my view it's very different it's light it's bright um it feels feels like a concrete bunker but above ground but it's it's sort of it's like a sensory deprivation chamber you know there's there's nothing to stimulate the senses there's nothing to stimulate curiosity which i think is very important for human beings everything's on the same level you never have to you know go up an incline or walk upstairs or anything uh and you know for a lot of the prisoners there's artificial light in their cells and it's kept on 24 hours a day.

42:27Yvonne Jewkes:It's torture. Horrible. But Yvonne, if someone has been the subject of a really awful crime or a family member of theirs has, and they really want to see that person suffer and brought to justice, is that not fair that they should feel that, that that person should be in inherently not a very nice environment like you're describing? being why why do they deserve better this is the big question isn't it why do they deserve any more if they've done that to me or the person that I love you know yeah it's a really hard question to answer because it's such a personal thing I've always found it quite odd when you see you know in America people on death row when people are executed and the families of their victims are invited to come and watch them at the point of death it doesn't feel like a an impulse that i i would feel that you know i would want to do but you don't know unless you you know i i haven't been in those people's circumstances their shoes so i can't say all all i think is that i don't believe in an eye for an eye i i think you know it's why i don't believe in the death penalty yeah there's something very uncivilized and and unhuman about wanting to inflict suffering on another person i want to move on to talk about some specific design principles in relation to prisons but but also the home and what can we learn that might apply to both places actually you know like starting with light for example we've mentioned light briefly but do you have certain specific thoughts or rules somehow around light that you think should be the basics for a prison but also you know what's your relationship like with light at home?

44:28Yvonne Jewkes:I think natural daylight is really important you know it's important for our mental health it's probably important for our physical health circadian rhythms sleep is a big problem in prisons for a whole variety of reasons. And so it's really important that people get natural daylight during the day and complete darkness at night. I like a lot of kind of, I like mood lighting, I like spotlights, I like lots of different kinds of lights at home. So I can, you know, change the lighting. I like to be able to light the fire, have flames flickering, candlelight you know i think all these are actually markers of my well-being um and i i've seen in prison that even people who don't have much money will save up to buy a table lamp um so that they don't have the harsh glare of of a ceiling lamp so can they turn the mark can they turn the ceiling light off if they want to yeah all right the vast majority can um and actually The Limerick Women's Prison, which I helped to design, I talked to the architects there about the importance of light and the importance of having autonomy and choice in lighting.

45:43Yvonne Jewkes:I would have loved them to be able to have fitted dimmer switches, but they couldn't. For some safety reason, they couldn't. But what they did do was fit a sort of dark indigo blue light as well as the normal white light. So the women have the choice between the two. So at night or in the evening, they can put this dark blue light on. The architects had done some research into some psychology studies, which showed that this dark blue light had some sort of beneficial effect on people's well-being. But, you know, that just that one little thing, giving them choice. Because, you know, prisons are environments that are designed to strip identity away completely and individuality.

46:30Yvonne Jewkes:so any anything that you can do to give that back uh i think it becomes more significant than we on the outside can possibly imagine just being able to flick that switch and put your own light on and turn it off you know it's huge so yeah light is is really important um as it is to all of us i mean you know it's just a kind of basic human need isn't it you know we're told that we sleep better if we go for a walk for 20 minutes first thing in the morning it's good for our health and that applies to people in prison just as it does on the outside yeah when are they allowed outside then generally how does that work again it varies from prison to prison from category to category um you know my friend nick spends quite a lot of time outside now because he goes out to work uh it's very sweet actually he was cycling to work he's bought a car now um he works in derby and it's i think it's about a 45 minute cycle ride and he sent me a little video one night of him and his mate cycling back to the prison from work in a blizzard it was snowing really heavily he said it was the first time he'd experienced snow in about 22 years yeah when you hear things like that you know it's quite poignant yeah um but in in kind of conventional say cat b cat c medium security high security prison uh exercise will be taken at particular times of day um in the yard uh generally a prison yard will have mesh covering it to prevent people throwing drugs or mobile phones or whatever over so even on a beautiful sunny day like today when the sky is blue you're looking at it through this steel mesh well that brings us on to nature then i mean what what kind of you know do they get any connection to nature really the natural world some do yeah um it's quite i always think that uh planting landscaping is important in prisons because if you've got trees and plants it attracts butterflies and bees and you don't get many small animals often in prisons you know squirrels and rabbits and things because there's a huge great wall around them but a lot of prisons have therapeutic gardens now and i've been you know quite instrumental in pushing those why have you pushed those because i think gardens again are just good for us and therapeutic gardens often have herbs and you know kind of strong smelling plants again that might attract bees and butterflies and they can just be places places of calm and again sanctuary refuge in prisons the problem is that very often prisons don't have the staff to escort prisoners to them okay so it's very common even at Halden actually in Norway for the therapeutic garden to remain locked up and unused yeah but often you know they'll have water features there are some prisons in this country that have got really nice gardens Elstoke is one that's quite near me in the southwest and it's got different housing units but outside one of them is a duck pond and there are two families of ducks that have made it their home.

50:06Yvonne Jewkes:And the prisoners look after it really well. And, you know, there's beautiful planting all around, hanging baskets, you know, you name it. And that does soften the prison environment. And it just makes it feel more, again, more normal and more pleasant to inhabit. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. What about materials? Again, you can imagine that prisons are metal. mostly concrete um tarmac you know this all adds to the sort of the grayness of them yeah they're gray they're hard they're man-made yeah not tactile toxic materials very often there's not much again not much softness but also not much difference in texture uh not much variability and variance in terms of different levels of horizons or different materials that things are made of.

51:07Yvonne Jewkes:When I visited my friend Nick in prison, I thought about what I was going to wear. And I wore a cashmere jumper because I knew that when we saw each other, we would hug each other. And it was something that went through my mind that actually he gets so little opportunity to feel softness on his hands um i love that you know just something that i i thought about so yeah the materials are exactly what you'd anticipate them being and again i would imagine not wholly good for people's mental health yeah so difficult because how do we introduce softness to something when it has to be you know wiped clean and it has to be safe and it has to be solid it's really difficult isn't it have you found ways to solve that one well by domesticating the environment as much as possible i think that prisoners should be allowed to have their own bedding for example but it has to meet a really high threshold of fire safety regulations so in most prisons that's not possible but you know like the women at court and veil things like rugs and cushions and bedspreads blankets you know things that are comforting soothing become very important and again also as i've said with the landscapes you know you can create soft landscapes which go a long way to making an environment feel a bit more pleasant a bit more home-like and all this affects the acoustics as well doesn't it because acoustics is such a big one it seems to me it must be in a prison but it's also at home i think um how how are you affected by acoustics in the home and how have you thought about it in the prison environment my home is very quiet uh and i'm grateful for that my home in cheltenham actually wasn't.

53:13Yvonne Jewkes:It was on quite a busy road. And then there was a main road with a lot of traffic, just kind of over to the right. And also, because all the houses dated from the same period, they were all quite old. There was constant maintenance going on all around me, scaffolding going up and down all the time. And now I live in Bath, and if ever I hear scaffolding gap i find it almost a bit triggering um you know again it's that very sharp harsh metallic noise and the noise of the workmen shouting at each other and all that kind of thing so as a writer now you know as a full-time writer and and you know um trying to develop a creative practice quiet peacefulness is really important to me uh i'd find that very difficult in prison And Nick often talks about the sort of torture of having to hear other people's music through the walls.

54:12Yvonne Jewkes:And it's all like drum and bass and, you know, that kind of thing. So acoustics is important. Acoustics is particularly important in certain areas of the prison, like the visiting hall. um so i've worked with uh some architects in scotland for example who designed the the the ceiling of the visiting hall uh using the same design and materials as had been used at the royal ballet i think okay um but very effective at muffling noise so that you know when you're sitting in a little group with your your family your loved ones you can actually hear what's being said because you can imagine in a visiting room where there are lots and lots of people uh and children running around and that kind of thing you know that the noise can get a bit intolerable um so it's something that i think is super important and it's and it's really crucial that that's thought about quite carefully in the design of new prisons yeah i think acoustic design is so clever and it makes such a difference to people's lives i feel you know just getting here today for example on the northern line which is one of the old lines you know they're pretty resonant that is quite a bombardment the trains themselves as well are um but but you know the areas around the platforms and then the bowels of the stations you know they're very clangy whereas you get on the jubilee line which i did today and it's a completely different world and it's so so clever the way they've mediated the sound and I sometimes talk about airports on the podcast as well but you know I've said before Terminal 5 at Heathrow I think is really really brilliantly designed from an acoustic standpoint have you noticed that yeah absolutely yeah yeah it makes such a difference doesn't it it does so this word hope it's a fantastic word and you've taught you've called your book an architecture of hope um why have you called it that and what does that expression mean to you?

56:09Yvonne Jewkes:I actually borrowed the term architecture of hope from Maggie's Cancer Care Centre, which is a network of non-clinical cancer care centres in the UK, but also there are some elsewhere in the world now that were started by the architects Maggie Keswick and Charles Jenks. Maggie was diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s I think and the rooms in Edinburgh Hospital where she had to have her chemotherapy Jenks described them as a kind of architectural aversion therapy and they came to the realisation that if there was an architecture that helped you to live and gave you hope it was not to be found in the standard hospital environment so they came up with this blueprint for these extraordinary centres.

57:02Yvonne Jewkes:And many Maggies are designed by very high profile sort of star architects, Frank Geary, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, you know, many others. And they are, they're a kind of very different kind of space, not one that heals physically, perhaps, but certainly can heal emotionally and spiritually. And they're all linked by certain aesthetic qualities. So gardens, beautiful views, calmness, tranquility, domesticity. When you walk into any Maggie centre, you're immediately confronted by a kitchen table and you can make yourself a cup of tea or whatever. And I think that's a really nice philosophy.

57:52Yvonne Jewkes:So the aesthetic is domestic rather than clinical. and that idea really struck me if architecture can create hope in places associated with illness could it possibly create the same in places associated with punishment and that really became the foundation of of all my work and and the book can prisons be designed as places of hope because prisons typically are designed according to an architecture of despair. And again, you know, I go back to that idea that, you know, if we take a group of already damaged people and surround them with ugliness and brutality, what do we expect? You know, what are going to be the consequences of that?

58:46Yvonne Jewkes:it seems blindingly obvious to me. So yeah, Maggie's Centres, I think, are a really good blueprint for thinking about how environments shape us intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The Maggie's Centres are absolutely fantastic, but they are also based around this idea of the kind of old-fashioned water closet, aren't they? Or that, you know, it's a place of dignity that you can retreat to and gather yourself and be in a private space. if you want to. Tell us about that. I think dignity is really important. I'm glad you brought that up. I think, you know, if prisons were designed to allow people to reclaim dignity, wouldn't that make a huge difference?

59:29Yvonne Jewkes:Because most people who end up in prison have had every scrap of dignity taken from them. And I think in reclaiming dignity, you can also claim identity you know you can claim your your own identity and that's that seems to me to be all important yeah everything about prison shreds dignity and so what does that leave you with you know in terms of a human being a shell really you know um so wouldn't it be great if you could get one of these stark attacks most of the ones i mentioned are dead unfortunately now but you know a very high profile architect to design a prison according to those kinds of principles.

1:00:19Yeah, it hasn't happened yet, has it?

1:00:21Yvonne Jewkes:No, I think, didn't Frank Gehry, with some students from Yale University, and he spent some time with them in Nordic prisons, looking at the kind of principles that influenced the architecture there. And I think he himself spent one night in a prison in America. The students came up with designs for more enlightened prisons, but none of them were actually realised, which is so often the case. You'll know Hilary Cottom. Oh, right. She designed something called the Learning Prison many years ago. And again, it had some influence in policy and politics, but it never actually got built. I don't know if it would ever be possible for an enlightened prison to actually be realised.

1:01:11Yvonne Jewkes:But it would be very interesting to do it just once as an experiment. Well, that's it, isn't it? Because the Maggie's centres are, let's be honest, they're slightly peripheral in the sense that they're built as sort of one-offs, aren't they? Kind of close to other hospitals, existing hospitals. And they're not medical in the sense that you don't get treated in them. There is sort of, there is space for cancer sufferers and their families to recuperate recuperate and to learn about their condition and so on so there's something about that isn't there they're kind of satellites almost and they're sort of showing what what could be possible that's how i see it so i think that'd be such an interesting experiment even that even some even a satellite to a prison that's somehow different that shows a way forward it could be a sort of halfway house or maybe even Category D prisons could be designed that way.

1:02:04Yvonne Jewkes:We're a very long way from that. Category D prisons, in my view, at the moment, are the worst part of the prison estate. They should be the best, you know, they should be the easy bit. But because of the pressures on the system, they're getting stuff full of CATC medium security prisoners and they're not really holding true to the ethos of being resettlement prisons, which you know is what they're supposed to be but yeah imagine if a if an open prison was designed along the same principles as a magis center like that could be quite revolutionary yeah really could um so my last question for you Yvonne is is is you know how would you summarize what studying prisons for so long has has really fundamentally taught you and what do you think that we can sort of take away today that we might think about in relation to our homes I know it's a difficult question but you know making that link back to the home again yeah I think my my relationship with my home now is very different uh from how it's ever been you know home has often felt a bit fragile to me um growing up as a child it did my father was an alcoholic and so uh home was quite a volatile place sometimes um obviously with the house I ended up with my partner in being the sort of huge restoration project that it ended up as.

1:03:31Yvonne Jewkes:My sense of home was quite disturbed, quite disrupted there. But now, you know, I'm in this house in Bath. It's like a doll's house, but it's beautiful. And, you know, I open my front door and there's Salisbury Hill right opposite me. And, you know, it is a place of sanctuary. The house that I wrote the book about ended up not being how I hoped it would be, because it was never finished. You know, that was the thing that I really wanted for it. But there came a point when I realised that the amount of time and money and patience it still required, I just had very limited reserves of. I'd sort of run out of all three by then.

1:04:20and I began to realize actually that if I stayed there the house would never release me

1:04:29Yvonne Jewkes:so in a way the story of the house was completed by the writing of the book and in fact I had a really peculiar attachment to that house I mean you'll get that from the book right you know I really thought that I would never leave I honestly believe that and then a week after finishing writing An Architecture of Hope, I put the house up for sale. And I sort of took myself by surprise in that. But in a way, I think the three years that it took me to write that book was a kind of process of alchemy for me. It was a long process of separation. And by the time I finished writing, I was free. I sort of felt free of the house.

1:05:11Yvonne Jewkes:And I realized that it was okay to let it go. And I think, you know, not only did it give me the story that it needed to give me, which I'm very grateful for, but I think it taught me that it's good to let things go. You know, it's good to know when to let things go. So whether that's a relationship or a home, job a career or the writing sometimes we just have to shed some baggage in order to make room for something new and i think that's the thing that i've i've really learned from this whole process so interesting thank you so much it's been fantastic my pleasure i've really enjoyed it thank you man thanks very much for listening i hope you enjoyed it a reminder that you can sign up to be a homing member on Patreon, which gets you access to behind the scenes home tours with our guests.

1:06:07If not, we're very happy to have you here, of course. You can also show your support by leaving us a quick review on Apple or Spotify, or perhaps a friendly comment on our YouTube channel. You'll find us at homing with Matt. This episode was produced by Podshop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks again for being here and talk to you next time. Bye bye.