Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilTous les volumes19IntroductionAdvocacy for a Critical Analysis ...

Introduction

Advocacy for a Critical Analysis of Prison Architecture

Olivier Milhaud et David Scheer
Traduction de Gail Ann Fagen
Cet article est une traduction de :
Plaidoyer pour une lecture critique de l’architecture carcérale [fr]

Texte intégral

1. Analysing the prison on the basis of its architectural space

  • 1 We should nevertheless bear in mind the work by Julie de Dardel (2016) on Colombia's import of the (...)

1The aim of this issue is to propose a series of ways to look at the contemporary prison on the basis of its architectural 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. Architecture, it is true, can be misleading as it imposes through the strength and evidence of built-up space. 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.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). All the authors recommend pursuing the analysis on the real effects of architecture in prisons, especially since these effects are so hard to perceive. The criminologist Yvonne Jewkes and the geographer Dominique Moran (2017), thus examined a paradox in prison architecture and design. 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). At the same time, however, the writers observe that today's prisons bear too close a resemblance to those of the past. The reproduction of models would seem to conceal the perpetual search to give a meaning to the prison and a constant effort to legitimise it (Scheer, 2016).

  • 2 From the Latin architect, Vitruvius, author of De architectura written around 30 B.C. See Rowland, (...)

2If we follow classical reasoning along the lines of the 17th century architect, Claude Perrault, architecture follow the Vitruvian triad,2 namely, strength (firmitassolidity/security in a prison one might say), utility (utilitas especially to help the guards maintain order) and beauty (venustas – reflected in the carefully studied colours and lighting in contemporary carceral architecture). Yet, the approach we adopt in this issue refuses to be led on by this architectural evidence. Quite the contrary, we aim to make use the architectural arrangement of carceral space for a critical analysis. The view that we propose of carceral space is not uniform, but rather an exploded view of an architectural space that is not all that solid, useful or agreeable, as was clearly documented in the recent work edited by Laurent Solini, Jennifer Yeghicheyan and Sylvain Ferez: La prison par ses lieux [The Prison Through its Places] (2019) or the special issue of Métropolitiques devoted to carceral architecture, edited by Carole Gayet-Viaud and Valérie Icard (2017).

3Thanks to the varied disciplines of the contributors to this issue of Champ pénal/Penal field we have been able to avoid this trap of architectural evidence and a purely function-based interpretation. Among the authors, Elsa Besson, an architectural historian, and Lucie Bony, a geographer, are specialists in space. All the writers, however, regardless of their discipline (political science, sociology, criminology, ethnology) have adopted a spatial approach to discuss the contemporary prison on the basis of its material configuration. Readers have plenty of other sources for a history of the architectural forms designed for prisons over the years (Higelin-Fusté, 2011 and Soppelsa, 2016 for 19th century France; Brodie et al., 2002 for England, or even the international panorama drawn up by Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture, 2007) or for the archaeology of the model that structured architectural notions for contemporary prisons in France (Demonchy, 2004). In this issue, the texts we propose have chosen the architectural distribution of prison places as the vantage point for a multi-location observation that is not limited to building forms yet refrains from dispersion in spatial multiplicity.

4Indeed, while the word architecture brings to mind the art of building construction and organisation, the word space makes us think of an extension (spacious) and distance (spacing), thus to places and their interconnection, to the spatial dimensions of social relationships. Although Philippe Boudon, obviously, also used the expression “architectural space” in his Essai d’épistémologie de l’architecture [Essay on the epistemology of architecture] (2003), he was resolutely referring to the very work the architect undertakes, at the early stages of a building, where architecture becomes a way to think of a space, at the crossroads of the space of graphic figuration, the corporal space of architectural gestures and the space where the spatial project is experienced, which the architect imagines and endeavours to translate materially. This issue of Champ pénal/Penal Field has no intention to take architecture as a scientific object, nor to write an architecturology, as Philippe Boudon encourages, but rather to take architecture as a field, to find a place within its walls to observe what goes on, concretely, at the level of spatial practices, in a prison cell, along a passageway, around a table.

5Even if this issue does not discuss architecture per se (the purely morphological approach) but deals with an architectural space in the strong sense of the term, articulating the places and the relations that occur in them, it does not loser itself in discussions on all the multiple aspects of carceral space in the broader sense. The articles focus on an articulation between materiality and practices rather than addressing all the issues related to social space (prison and its social hierarchies, for example) or to represented space (media's image of the prison). The advantage of starting from the materiality of carceral space lies in the possibility of seeing what it does to practices, in other words what it makes the actors in that space do.

6The focal point of choice in the articles is thus that of the architectural space, not limited to its mere materiality. This is because the uses that the architecture enables, the practices that circumvent the project owner's injunctions and even the ideologies that guide the design of the prison and the rules that govern the places, are never reduced to a dimension too narrowly material, as Solini et al. (2019) illustrate so well. While the spatial dimension is what simultaneously unites all the different trajectories (those of the building, of the various prisoners, of the professionals and other actors, of political ideologies), the space surely belongs to the realm of coexistence, of all the objects and people found together at the same instant and which, both in and through this space, will search for ways to get along with each other; the space is surely political as Henri Lefebvre (1968) or Doreen Massey (2005) remind us. It can even be the interface between concepts of co-existence and the realities of life in society. This is the line of thought that guides this issue.

  • 3 Own translation.

7A prison is definitely not an inert building, brainchild of one architect, but rather a sum of actors assembled in this building who manipulate its material dimensions, its materials, its volumes and its furnishings. As Annalisa Iorio (2013, 130) has said: “architectural space is as much the domain and the product of a professional category that implies specific skills (architects, designers, technicians) as it is that of the action and appropriation of those who experience it daily (the inhabitants, users, non-experts)”3.

8Rather than listing typologies or starting from relations between the actors, the springboard that we propose – an analysis of carceral reality through and throughout architectural space – makes it clearer to understand the bonds formed among actors based on the sites and material configurations of their interactions. The ambition is not to address every single facet of the question, but to place ourselves resolutely in the spatial realm. In other words, we have chosen to explore the full multiplicity of places and positions, thus taking advantage of the boundless spatial interpretations possible. In realms where architects endeavour to distinguish one place from another, the social sciences have the benefit of multiple angles for observation, inviting them to continue refining interpretations which could otherwise be hasty generalisations.

2. The risks of an architectural interpretation

9The starting point proposed in this issue is neither completely new (Moran, Jewkes, 2015; Ouart, Joanne, 2015; Gayet-Viaud, Icard, 2017; Solini et al., 2019), nor a miracle revelation. Nevertheless, this perspective can be seen as an exercise that provides multiple and diversified ways to view prison in its more commonplace daily experience. We have here a plan for research that is both simple in spirit, yet complex in its conceptual implementation. In fact, using the space of architecture to talk about the prison entails pursuing several epistemological threads that need to be addressed (even if they cannot be untangled).

10To begin with, in the mind of the reader, evoking architecture generally presumes an analysis in terms of generality (or generalisation). When architecture serves as a pretext to study monastic life or safety in stadiums, for example, it becomes the overall receptacle for an analysis laying claim to a relative universality. But this is the type of analytical bias that this issue wishes precisely to avoid. The aim is rather to examine case studies with no intention to consider them as examples of a so-called generality. The advantage is thus to do justice to the plurality of carceral places, actors and experiences. As such, the architectural space analysis developed in the articles can avoid speaking of the prison in general, or even of architecture per se. Indeed, it will be primarily a question of situated space(s) and contextualized practices. Elsa Besson's article provides the historical depth of this contemporary interpretation architectural space by explaining the articulation, constantly renewed, between ideality and materiality – yet going beyond merely noting the gap between the architect's project and the practices that actually occur in situ (Dieu, Mbanzoulou, 2011).

11Speaking of architectural space also entails the pitfall of speaking only about space or architecture – a sort of tunnel effect, forgetting what a unique place a prison is, the real practices that go on there, the subjectivity of each actor and the differentiation of experiences. There are different ways to categorise space in prison. To begin with, carceral spaces are determined by particular zones: circumscribed with names, procedures and profiles defined by the prison administration, different levels of security, as described in Manon Veaudor's article on practices to assign prisoners to one place or another. These zones are circumscribed and crossed by lines of movement. Nodes appear in the superposition of zones or intersection of lines. We can find this way to categorise prison space in the discourse of architects, but also in that of other actors of and in confinement. Secondly, carceral space is intimately and directly defined by the uses made of it. The places become spaces that are worked through, spaces that constrain people, spaces of informal management, spaces of relative porosity (Solini et al., 2016). In general, this is the categorisation found in sociology of experience. Lastly, carceral space is determined by representations, sensations and perceptions. Space is transformed by the “colour” one gives to it or how each individual experiences it. It is a phenomenological vision of the places. To avoid this analytical abyss and refrain from concentrating overmuch on the qualification instead of the space itself, this issue proposes a special way of angle of approach: studying prison architectural space for what it is, how it is produced and, even more, what it makes happen.

12The myth of the all-seeing eye, the omniscient gaze from above, is certainly tempting, but it increases the risk of an object analysed coldly under the pretext of objectivity. When social complexity is simplified drastically it offers an easy, yet misleading, reading. Our choice, however, was never a no-risk interpretation that spoke about walls, without ever daring to face the possible contradictions among actors. Furthermore, this issue intends to defend a critical vision of architectural space in the prison, a space that is neither pre-determined nor normative. Herein lies the interest of the interview with Lucie Bony. She demonstrates this obsession with programming found in the Livre blanc sur l'immobilier pénitentiaire (2017) [White paper on prison real estate] and explains why we should be wary. Architecture is often reduced to the work of design. It conditions an analysis in terms of responses to problems defined by a policy, a current event, a set of technical specifications. We felt the necessity to depart from this view of built space as an authority's response to a circumscription of problems and issues at stake. Beyond the design, architecture is often attributed the power to support, or even embody, an ideology. Architects, in fact, often proclaim the 'philosophy' underlying their projects. In the realm of the prison, and regardless of the designer's convictions, architecture is over-exploited as a vehicle for ideology (Milhaud, 2015). Indeed, a prison sentence is precisely a spatial punishment: both depriving liberty and imposing a particular kind of space. This is all the more true when detention conditions tend to become normalized. The chains disappear, prisoners' rights are regularly defended, access to hygiene and decent food becomes more common. While other constraints continue to exist (solitary confinement cells, ankle cuffs, medication, handcuffs and other types of restraints), and contemporary prison conditions are definitely not 'normalised' (deteriorated buildings, imposed social relations, limited contacts, submission to authority, loss of privacy and autonomy, overcrowding, etc.), the prison sentence seems to be increasingly limited to a strictly spatial punishment. As such, something in the realm of ideality is entrusted to spatial materiality – which some simply refer to as “architecture”. Correction or, failing that, separation; protection or, failing that, making invisible; re-integration or, failing that, normalization, are all missions entrusted to the architecture. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that the materiality of architecture leads to practices. Jennifer Yeghicheyan shows quite well that the architect's rotunda leads to movements and circulating. Stability is mere fiction. The reality of daily practices – often evoked in the articles published in this issue – shows us gestures, habits, uses that come up against the utopia of design. What is more, design itself – architecture – is “perverted” by the way the prison functions as soon as priority is given alternatively to external security (preventing escape), internal security (avoiding riots and maintaining order) or re-integration. This has incited one of us (Milhaud, 2009) to conclude that there is a diachrony in prison architecture – with the ideality of the design being the vehicle – masked by the synchrony of daily functioning.

13Lastly, and especially, it is a question of avoiding the artificial gap between the design and the way it is experienced. By speaking of space one can move beyond the idea of an immutable architecture. While architecture consists in a work of figuration, design and construction, architectural space runs through and transcends this work by surviving the tests of time, undergoing transformations, hosting the practices of its users, providing a stage for feelings and experiences. Anaïs Tschanz's article explains how the prison cell is the material setting for a range of private experiences. “Buildings endure longer than the ideas that give them substance” (Fairweather, 2000, 62). Thus there is something cyclical in our discussions about architectural space, a continual back-and-forth between figuration and habitation, between imagining the concept and putting it to the test. Our analytical prism consists in looking into objects, spaces, places and situated practices, in their profound uniqueness (even if they are often duplicated and reproduced), in order to draw as close as possible to the prison itself. The very idea that a professional architect (a person assigned the task to design buildings and draft their blueprints) would be the only one responsible for thinking up a space is an analytical trap. Indeed, architecture is the result of several elements and it is often complicated to grasp all the repercussions of a particular design concept. In any case, the architecture is in place. If at first it seems to embody a particular ideology or philosophy, it persists where ideology disappears or is transformed. In her article, Valérie Icard underscores how normalizing prison conditions and euphemizing the security apparatus in Spain have not kept the prison system from reinventing its disciplinary inertia. The space itself endures after architecture – considering its inherent link with ideality – has lost its status as a vehicle for a certain delegated authority. This double observation (the architect is not the sole designer; architecture disappears giving way to space) implies what is at the heart of this issue: the architect is not the only one entitled to talk about architecture. One might even wonder if they are the best placed… The verb 'placed' thus takes on full meaning since it is a question of assuming the point of view of those who are directly affected by the prison space and the objects that comprise it.

3. Critical interpretations of spatial realities in prison

14It should be clear now that this issue intends to emphasise daily practices and actual experiences by looking into architectural space as something that underpins the experience of incarceration (from both sides of the bars) or else as a participant in power plays and workarounds (Scheer, 2014); in other words “putting it to use”. Multiplicity is the main advantage of an analysis in terms of architectural space because it offers a multifocal view of a place, an object, an interaction. This multiplication of views and interpretations of prison transpires in the articles that compose this issue: observing a place like the prison cell, observing movements and circulation, classifications and physical arrangements. By moving beyond the gap between the original design and actual uses, the spatial multiplicity tends to demonstrate how inexhaustible a critical interpretation of carceral realities can be. The closer we move in on the walls, towards this built framework that configures interactions, the clearer we perceive the most flagrant internal contradictions of the prison institution.

15This issue is thus intended as a panorama of ways to see the contemporary prison and its architectural space. It opens with an interview with Luci Bony, a geographer who was on the commission responsible for the Livre blanc sur l’immobilier pénitentiaire (2017, White paper on prison real estate) for the French government. She discusses the work of this commission whose 50-some members included representatives of the government, the French Parliament and experts from the fields of architecture and the social sciences. In the interview, Bony, underlines the over-investment in architectural space to cope with the diversity of the prison population, the weight of a primarily functionalist view of prison areas (cells, collective areas, etc.) and major issues at stake in the process of producing architectural space (public-private partnerships, impact of economic constraints) that do not bode well for a truly new way of thinking about prison architecture. Elsa Besson, architectural historian, starts with the overwhelming presence of the prison cell model, still today presented as the ideal form for the individual prison, to develop an analysis of the rigid spatial characteristics in contemporary prisons. The prison's goal of moralisation is always shaped by increased normalization and securization of prison sites. The article by Valérie Icard, political scientist, extends this examination with a case study on new prisons in Spain. Behind the true evolutions in the materiality of Spanish prisons, well expressed in the multiplication of centros tipo penitenciarios (centre-type prisons), we see an intensified articulation emerging between normalizing the space, euphemizing the security structure and rationalizing maintenance of order. Architectural space promoted in this way facilitates categorizing of prisoners and uses of the space, which comes about giving priority to intra-muros discipline. By studying categorizations and assignment practices in French detention centres, the political scientist, Manon Veaudor, goes further into this question and underlines how this same logic is found in prison systems throughout the world. By elucidating the common logics of classification – between containment, avoiding and regrouping certain populations, this article invites readers to situate the study of architectural space in the local site of priorities. The two articles that follow look into carceral space by focusing on two emblematic incarceration sites, between anchoring and mobilities. The ethnologist Jennifer Yeghicheyan analyses the uses of the central rotunda in a detention centre. The heart of what the guards call the 'anthill', a decisive element in the structure for movements and prisoner surveillance, is the site for sociabilities and power relationships that upset the institutions' mainstay structure, between bypass strategies and concealed sociabilities. The criminologist, Anaïs Tschanz, then explores the private lives of incarcerated people through the prism of prison cell space in a Canadian prison. Her reflection revolves around the cell door, which protects privacy at the same time as it enables intrusions. She is also interested in cell furnishing which lends itself to tactics to appropriate the space, an appropriation that is constantly under threat of re-evaluation. And lastly, demonstrating that the approach proposed is transposable outside the prison, the issue closes a short step away, focusing on a closed educational centre, astutely analysed by the sociologist Rita Carlos. Her analysis underlines the multiplicity of this centre as a space, characterised by the diversity of the movements and the forms of occupation that it permits and their interlocking with the social relations that transcend, intersect and shape it. An attuned look at architectural space gives an even clearer grasp of the multiplicity of the material space itself, which is the support for the social and sexual divisions of space-time and the very issue at stake in struggles to obtain the best vantage point in this space.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Boudon P., 2003, Sur l’espace architectural, Essai d’épistémologie de l’architecture, Marseille, Parenthèses.

Brodie A., Croom J., Davies J., 2002, English Prisons. An architectural history, Swindon, English Heritage.

Dardel de J., 2016, Exporter la prison américaine. Le système carcéral colombien à l’ère du tournant punitif, Neuchâtel, Éditions Alphil.

Demonchy C., 2004, L’architecture des prisons modèles françaises, in Philippe A., Lascoumes P. (Eds.), Gouverner, enfermer. La prison, un modèle indépassable?, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 269-293.

Dieu F., Mbanzoulou P. (Ed.), 2011, L’architecture carcérale. Des mots et des murs, Agen, ENAP.

Fairweather L., McConville S., 2000, Prison Architecture. Policy, design and experience, Oxford, Architectural Press.

Fransson E., Giofrè F., Johnsen B., 2018, Prison, Architecture and Humans, Oslo, NOASP, [on-line] https://press.nordicopenaccess.no/index.php/noasp/catalog/book/31.

Gayet-Viaud C., Icard V., 2017, Architecture carcérale et sens de la peine: formes et usages contemporains de la prison, Métropolitiques, [on-line] https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Architecture-carcerale-et-sens-de-la-peine-formes-et-usages-contemporains-de-la.html.

Hancock P., Jewkes Y., 2011, Architectures of incarceration: The spatial pains of imprisonment, Punishment & Society, 13, 5, 611-629.

Higelin-Fusté A., 2011, La prison pénale en France de 1791 à 1848: élaborer l’espace de la réclusion, PhD Dissertation, Grenoble, Université de Grenoble.

Iorio A., 2013, Espace pensé, espace rêvé, Journal des anthropologues, 134-135, [on-line] http:// journals.openedition.org/jda/4769.

Jewkes Y., Moran D., 2017, Prison Architecture and Design: Perspectives from Criminology and Carceral Geography, in Liebling A., Maruna S., McAra L. (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Criminology,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 541-561.

Johnston N., 2007, Forms of Constraint A History of Prison Architecture, Champaign, University of Illinois Press.

Lefebvre H., 1968 [1996, translated and edited by Kofman E. and Lebas E.], The Right to the City, in Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 63-177.

Massey D., 2005, For Space, London, Sage.

Milhaud O., 2009, Séparer et punir. Les prisons françaises: mise à distance et punition par l'espace, PhD Dissertation, Bordeaux, Université de Bordeaux 3.

Milhaud O., 2015, L’enfermement ou la tentation spatialiste. De “l’action aveugle, mais sûre” des murs des prisons, Annales de géographie, 2, 140-162.

Moran D., Jewkes Y., 2015, Linking the carceral and the punitive state: A review of research on prison architecture, design, technology and the lived experience of carceral space, Annales de géographie, 2, 163-184.

Morelle M., Le Marcis F., 2016, Que nous apprennent les prisons africaines?, Mouvements, 88, 45-49.

Ouart T., Joanne P., 2015, L’architecture des nouvelles prisons, in Cholet D. (Ed.), Les nouvelles prisons. Enquête sur le nouvel univers carcéral français, Rennes, Pur, 211-266.

Scheer D., 2014, La prison de murs troués…, Champ pénal/Penal field, XI, [on-line] http:// journals.openedition.org/champpenal/8833.

Scheer D., 2016, Conceptions architecturales et pratiques spatiales en prison. De l’investissement à l’effritement, de la reproduction à la réappropriation, PhD Dissertation, Brussels, Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Solini L., Scheer D., Yeghicheyan J., 2016, “Une fenêtre ouverte sur l’extérieur”: Écologie de deux espaces carcéraux, Sociologie, 7, 3, 225-242.

Solini L., Yeghicheyan J., Ferez S. (Ed.), 2019, La prison par ses lieux, Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne.

Soppelsa C., 2016, Le XIXe siècle et la question pénitentiaire: un siècle d’expérimentations architecturales dans les prisons de Paris, PhD Dissertation, Tours, Université de Tours.

Rowland I., Howe Th. (Ed.), 2001, Vitruvius: “Ten Books on Architecture”, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Haut de page

Notes

1 We should nevertheless bear in mind the work by Julie de Dardel (2016) on Colombia's import of the USA maximum-security prison model, reminding us that we cannot dismiss prisons in the South as delapidated collective buildings turned into prisons with little expenditure. See also the works by Marie Morelle et Frédéric Le Marcis (2016) on the broad diversity of African prisons.

2 From the Latin architect, Vitruvius, author of De architectura written around 30 B.C. See Rowland, Howe, 2001.

3 Own translation.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Olivier Milhaud et David Scheer, « Advocacy for a Critical Analysis of Prison Architecture »Champ pénal/Penal field [En ligne], 19 | 2020, mis en ligne le 05 novembre 2020, consulté le 12 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/champpenal/11966 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.11966

Haut de page

Auteurs

Olivier Milhaud

Sorbonne University, Research Unit Mediations – Science of places, science of bonds
milhaud.olivier[at]gmail.com

Articles du même auteur

David Scheer

CNRS – Lille Centre for the Study and Research of Economics and Sociology (CLERSE)/National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC)
davscheer[at]gmail.com

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search