14 July 2022 · By Yvonne Jewkes

What can architects learn from this mould-breaking new prison? Yvonne Jewkes, who was closely involved in its commissioning, explains the thinking behind its design

T he new Limerick women’s prison, due to open in January 2023, will look unlike any other prison in Ireland – or England, for that matter. While the UK’s Ministry of Justice is prioritising security, control and cost over architectural appeal in the new buildings that will provide an additional 500 female prison places in England, the Irish Prison Service (IPS) has commissioned a 50-bed facility that promotes autonomy, individuality and wellbeing. And where England’s new women’s prisons have imposing elevations and very little green space, Limerick offers a natural, healing environment and is a balm for the senses.

Architecturally, Limerick prison resembles the best of Scandinavian corrections facilities, but the construction company behind it, PJ Hegarty working with architecture practice Henry J Lyons, has also taken design cues from the pioneering network of Maggie’s cancer care centres. With a light, bright, open reception area, expansive living spaces and no bars on any of the large windows, the new facility is a world away from the old Limerick prison where women are held in dank, catacomb-like cells built in 1821, and exercise in a small concrete yard topped with thick wire mesh and razor wire.

Getting away from the institutional feel of long straight corridors and sharp corners with inevitable blind spots, Henry J Lyons has introduced aesthetically pleasing curves into the structure. A staircase connecting the two levels of the accommodation unit gently bends towards a huge elongated oval cut-out recess in the ceiling, revealing a skylight which floods light into the social spaces below. And all the bedrooms look on to a curvilinear garden full of mature trees, wooden seating and lush planting. The architectural vision bears similarities to dRMM’s design of Maggie’s in Oldham, where a birch tree grows in the centre of the building, and to the natural light, greenery and views of Foster + Partners’ Manchester Maggie’s. Limerick’s interior has a calming colour palette of lilac and pale blue in the communal living areas and warm creams and greys in the bedrooms.

Limerick has no ligature points but may be more effective at preventing suicide and self-harm by being a pleasant, welcoming environment, rather than an anodyne and dehumanising institution. In fact, the trendy, retro-chic fixtures and furnishings might be more usually found in a high-quality student hall of residence or well-designed budget hotel. The prison is trauma-informed, not just for the women held there, but also for their relatives. The visiting room has a glazed wall overlooking the gardens and includes outdoor space and a play area for children. Inside, it has seating in cosy booths to allow private conversation. It is decorated in bright colours and is avowedly ‘normal’ in feel – more like the kind of café you would find in a John Lewis or M&S.

Where England’s new women’s prisons have imposing elevations and little green space, Limerick offers a natural, healing environment

It’s fair to say I’m biased in thinking this is a good design because I was involved at every stage of its commission. Bringing 25 years’ experience in prison research to the project, I persuaded the prison service to hold a design competition, helped to write the brief and took part in the assessment process. I posed questions to the competing contractors, encouraging them to examine their preconceptions about prisons and helped them to visualise a different future for women in custody. Borrowing Charles Jencks’s description of Maggie’s Centres, I asked the four shortlisted (all-male) consortiums to think about what an ‘architecture of hope’ might look like for women in Irish prisons, and I urged them to imagine that a female relative of theirs was going to be confined in the facility they were designing. Would they be confident, I asked, that their mother, sister or daughter would not only be safe and treated decently in the prison they were planning, but could thrive and flourish?

The winning design is a radical departure for the Irish Prison Service and, unusually, was the second most expensive submission, underlining that architectural innovation was prioritised over cost. I’m conscious, however, that our plans could look like architectural utopianism. Concepts such as ‘normalisation’ and ‘trauma-informed’ have gained speedy traction within prison circles, and I know many architects who are fully committed to the ethos of rehabilitative design. But rarely do these well-intentioned ideas quite live up to their heady promise. They fail not because they don’t make a difference to the quality of everyday life, but because there is little they can do to address the broader, long-term, structural conditions that make rehabilitation and understanding of trauma necessary.

The reality is that ‘normal’ for many women who end up in prison is poverty, men’s violence and a lack of resources (not just money and social capital, but often the most basic of requirements such as their own clothes). Consequently, imaginative, humane architecture may make the people who commission it feel a whole lot better than those people on the receiving end. For these reasons, I have occasionally been asked by my academic colleagues if my attempts to positively influence the design of prisons are a bit like trying to apply lipstick to a pig. Certainly, no amount of thoughtful environmental design is going to compensate for the harms inflicted by losing one’s liberty and being separated from family. Even Norway’s famous high-security Halden Prison, universally lauded (fetishised, even) for its ‘inspiring’ architecture and ‘stimulating’ interior – including in the  AJ – is more controversial than often supposed. 

A UK newspaper once described Halden, designed by HLM Arkitektur in collaboration with Erik Møller Arkitekter, as a model of minimalist chic … more Scandinavian boutique hotel than class-A prison. Having conducted a research study there, I can tell you that prisons described as ‘boutique hotels’ by time-pressed journalists seeking an eye-catching headline, are not experienced in this way by their occupants. As one man there put it to me, it’s not a hotel, not by a long shot. People calling it Hotel Halden don’t know what they’re talking about.

Sketch plan by architect Henry J Lyons showing arrangement around central courtyard

In fact, several of the men at Halden intimated that the normalised aesthetics and natural beauty of the environment were experienced as a kind of sleight-of-hand, taunting them with a small sense of freedom, that was ultimately denied. There are real manifestations of this deception. When asked about the prison’s location within a forest, one prisoner said, I can’t walk in the woods. I just have to look at it. That’s more painful, actually, because, you know, I miss the smell and the touch and how it affects me, it makes me calm … So, yeah, it’s more like they put a meal in front of you, but say you can’t touch it.

I hope the prison will be a beautiful, calm, creative place in which the women might stand a chance of taking control of their lives

So the lived experience of people occupying humane, innovatively designed prisons is invariably going to be more complex than architects might imagine. There are other potential problems with designing and building ‘beautiful’ prisons, too. The progressiveness and attractiveness of thoughtfully designed corrections facilities can become part of the justification to impose custodial sentences when there might be more appropriate alternatives, which can in turn be used as an excuse to expand the carceral estate, particularly in countries such as the UK, US and Australia where building more prisons is used as a political response to rising crime (often, more accurately, rising criminalisation).

Nonetheless, I would not argue against designing more prisons in the Nordic model rather than ones at the more punitive end of the spectrum. As architectural historian Tom Wilkinson (2018) says, the worst prisons not only confine, they also torture and kill. In this context, however insidious the Scandi-furnished mind-control of the Swedish system,  it would still seem preferable to spend a stretch there than banged up in ADX Florence in Colorado.

Two of the best designs I’ve come across for women’s prisons were never built. HMP Inverclyde, a national facility for women in Scotland, was shelved for good reasons – not least that it was going to be a large prison (300 places) considering the nation’s total women prison population is only around 400, entailing difficulties for prisoners’ relatives to visit them. But the renders show it to be genuinely pathbreaking in its approach and I’m hopeful that the alternative plans (led by Holmes Miller) for a 50-bed national prison on the site of the former HMP Cornton Vale, and five regional community custody units, will incorporate many of Inverclyde’s innovative design cues.

The other unbuilt female facility that I think might have radically changed the way women’s prisons are conceived was the design for a prison in Iceland by Madrid-based OOIIO Architecture. Inspired by the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times, the circular, interlinked pavilions resemble the internal mechanism of a clock (a knowing nod to ‘doing time’) and another temporal reference is provided by the peat-filled cages covering the buildings’ façades, into which would be planted local wildflowers that would come and go with each passing season.

Although neither were realised, both Inverclyde and the Icelandic prison had a significant impact on the design of Limerick. I’m hopeful that, when it opens, it will be a beautiful, calm, creative place in which the women held there might stand a chance of taking control of their lives and building better futures.

dRMM’s Maggie’s Oldham, to which the new Limerick women’s prison bears architectural similarities

And, finally, what would be my advice to architects of prisons that hold women? Firstly, include women on your design team. Then, imagine a relative being confined in the spaces you are creating. Remember that most of the women in prison have been victims of far more serious crimes than the ones for which they were convicted. And bear in mind that many will not have lived anywhere remotely aspirational in their lives. I showed some women in prison in Ireland the architects’ renders for HMP Inverclyde. Wow, they said, that’s the nicest room I’ve ever seen. It’s nicer than my room at home. Imagine that.

Yvonne Jewkes is professor of criminology and prison design expert at the University of Bath

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