[Yvonne Jewkes with her latest book An Architecture of Hope]
With our prisons currently bursting at the seams, and many of them with serious maintenance issues, maybe it’s time to think again about how punishment relates to crime. Yvonne Jewkes is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath and no stranger to publishing academic books on penal reform.
She has spent three decades advising on rehabilitative prison design and is passionate about the potential of architecture to create more humane spaces of internment where many offenders could be rehabilitated before returning to the world outside.
Her latest publication “An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the prison, restoring the house, rebuilding myself” offers a different and more intimate read. Her experiences of prisons in this country and abroad ( she reckons she’s visited 150 of them around the world ) is fully documented – as are her attempts to create prison designs that encourage hope and healing for many of those who have lost their liberty.
However, also woven into the chapters is her own story of starting over after her partner of 25 years left her trapped in the middle of a nightmare house renovation project as the Covid lockdown arrived.
Yvonne visited ‘Wyatt’s Place’ to talk about the book – taking us on a tour of places of penal confinement and challenging our expectations of what prisons are for.
Her book is available at all good bookstores and online.
Publisher: Scribe Publications ISBN: 9781914484780
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