The Architect Is Our Enemy

Far, far away, high above the concerns of mere mortals, some specky git with a striped shirt and braces is slaving away over a hot PC, designing cells for the next new prison(s). The bastard. I doubt Inside Time is required reading for members of RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) but if it is, they are probably wondering what on earth they have done to deserve my wrath.

The idiots who designed and built my current box are, happily, dead and time gives me a useful alibi. For whilst the Egyptians managed to cobble together the pyramids with some semblance of symmetry, a mere 200 years ago a local inbred managed to build 200 cells with no two having the same dimensions. It is so bad that it must surely have been deliberate, a workers attempt to bring some variety to his miserable existence.

Such individualism has now been extinguished. This is only partly welcome. These ancient hovels had no upstart ideas about furniture, or even natural light, allowing the prison to do whatever it felt useful at the time. Apart from the light and small, high windows, these old holes are probably my favourite types of cell because no thought at all went into trying to make them other than an empty box.

Throw in a bed and a few bits of furniture and you allow the occupant to so arrange things to his or her own satisfaction. Walk the landing and you will see that no two cells are alike. Each is arranged to maximise the happiness, and decrease the awkwardness, of the man inside. This is aided by the liberation of useful extras such as decent chairs and bits of carpet.

Such a happy, individualistic time could not be stomached by our Masters, and so they just had to start bolting beds to the floor and not necessarily in the best place either. The excuses for this ranged from safety (the need to quickly find a body in a fire) to control (to stop barricades). None of these rang true. A fireman who couldn’t find a charred man in a toilet sized room needs a new job; and reversible doors make efforts to barricade embarrassing.

Such a small change, fixing a bed, but it alters the whole way of life behind the door. The bed was a piece of exercise equipment; a sofa for parties; a barrier to sudden assault, and even a pain: chucking it out and sleeping on the floor is no longer an option.

Imagine, then, the misery that is the new, standard Safer Cell design, coming to new prisons near you. This is the pinnacle of the architects wickedness. About 9 feet long and 6 wide, you’d think there were possibilities to do something good here. Alas, no. Everything is steel, and fixed. No bed, but a steel shelf bolted to the wall. Ditto with tables. No chair; but a steel box fixed to the floor or a steel shelf welded to the wall. Steel toilet, with no seat. Just what you need in the winter with a dodgy stomach. For extra laughs, Group 4/GSL issued nylon duvets instead of sheets and blankets, so that every time you touched any part of your cell you receive static shocks. Genius. Adding insult, the windows don’t open. To rack up the stress, the heating pipes run clinging to the back of the cells in an open cage, allowing you to experience every fart and grunt from your neighbours.

And the point of this design? Its intended to cut down on self-harming. Talk about getting to the root causes of suicide; oh no, lets just make sure they can’t do it. Prison Service thinking at its very best.

Cells are where people live, to a greater or lesser extent. In some places, you are in them for fleeting moments during the day, and in others you are lucky to be let out for exercise. It is a living room, bedroom, dining room and toilet. And often shared with another person you don’t know from Adam. Given the central place the cell has in a prisoners life, you’d think someone would give a moments thought as to what it is like to live in them. You’d think architects would have a fleeting idea of what it may be like to live in such a space, designed from on-high.

But no, we all know better. A box is a box, and that seems to be as far as the designers care to think. In all fairness, the blame should be spread wider, especially to those local managers who design regimes. For those very small cells, the length of a bed, were designed with the intention of having an active regime. You were not meant to spend any significant time in them. But the regime can change with the flick of a pen, and suddenly you find yourself doing bang-up in a kennel. Genius. As far as I can discover, never in the history of imprisonment in Britain have prisoners been asked about their cells, or what they need. Never.

Ask yourself this if our masters can’t even be bothered to give consideration to the central feature of a prisoners existence, how much thought do you think they give to anything else that affects us?

Ben Gunn is currently resident in HMP Shepton Mallet