Architecture sustains a succession of penal goals (reforming in a healthy prison imposing order, discipline, punishment, dissuasion banking all on individual reintegration limiting efforts to a new penology of risk management), and much ink has been spilled about the search to “normalize carceral space” and “humanise the places” (to echo the wording of public policies). The criminologist Yvonne Jewkes and the geographer Dominique Moran (2017), thus examined a paradox in prison architecture and design.
All the authors recommend pursuing the analysis on the real effects of architecture in prisons, especially since these effects are so hard to perceive. 1 It is no surprise that research by Anglo-Americans (Fairweather, McConville, 2000 Johnston, 2007 Jewkes, Moran, 2017) and Europeans (Italian and Scandinavian in Fransson et al., 2018 Belgian and French in Solini et al., 2019) has all stressed the low number of studies on prison architecture, even though it certainly plays a role in what Philip Hancock and Yvonne Jewkes call “the spatial pain of imprisonment” (2011, 611). This is especially true in the global North, where the material resources invested in enclosure are immensely higher than in many countries in the global South. Architecture, it is true, can be misleading as it imposes through the strength and evidence of built-up space.
Understanding the prison from this angle does not necessarily mean restricting oneself to a purely morphological approach, of more interest to architects than to the social sciences. 1 We should nevertheless bear in mind the work by Julie de Dardel (2016) on Colombia's import of the (.)ġThe aim of this issue is to propose a series of ways to look at the contemporary prison on the basis of its architectural space.
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