Designing Prisons and Writing Narrative Non-Fiction: Coming Full-Circle

I had no intention of being a criminologist. I studied English Literature as an undergraduate and then did an MA in Mass Communications Research. During my Masters, I read some audience studies that I found interesting. In the days before everyone streamed content on their phones and laptops, family TV viewing was strongly gendered. The male ‘head of household’ – or when he wasn’t present, male children – restricted the range of options open to less powerful members of the family; women and girls.

It got me thinking about what would happen in an all-male environment…say, a prison? This was just before in-cell TV was introduced, when prisoners still watched television together in large groups. Would some lower-status men effectively be ‘feminised’, their viewing preferences quashed by the alpha males, I wondered? So, my PhD thesis was about prisoners’ media habits and I hoped my research would reveal why media are important to all of us, not only for providing information and entertainment, but in forming identities, and relationships with others. It was originally going to be a Media Studies thesis but a friend suggested I try sending my proposal to the Cambridge Institute of Criminology – and that’s how I became a criminologist.

If you’re in any doubt about the impact of media that most of us take for granted, even in a pre-Internet era (although prisons are mostly still in a pre-Internet era), consider this, said to me by someone who spent time in solitary confinement in the 1970s: “When I was in the Scrubs, I spent 6 months in segregation without a radio. Then the chaplain brought one in. I remember hearing a newscaster talking so fast it wouldn’t go in. It blew my brain”. Imagine leaving prison now at the end of a thirty-year sentence and trying to get your head around smartphones with screens that must be swiped rather than buttons pressed, or even dials rotated.

Over the years, my research interests have evolved, and most of my work now is on the architecture of incarceration. I’ve helped to design a few prisons around the world too, including the new Limerick women’s prison in Ireland, which will open this summer. I try and encourage architects to design buildings that are sensitive to the traumas that many people in prison have experienced, and that rehabilitate rather than punish. I’ve been lucky enough to win two prestigious awards for the ‘real world’ impact of my research, especially in relation to Limerick – the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize, and the Market Research Society’s President’s Medal.

When the Irish Prison Service approached me for help in planning their new women’s facility in Limerick, I persuaded them to hold a design competition, as is more common in northern Europe, with no design template to work to. The architects had free reign to come up with whatever they wanted. Four competing contractors were shortlisted and I presented my research findings to them. I encouraged the architects to be bigger and bolder in their ideas, and to imagine what an ‘architecture of hope’ might look like for women in prison. The winning design by PJ Hegarty and Henry J Lyons was a radical departure for Ireland and, highly unusually, it was the second most expensive submission, underlining that it was design innovation, not cost, that was prioritised. I couldn’t be prouder because it so goes against the grain of what happens in England & Wales, where we are currently building 500 new female prison places that have all the charm of 1970s H-blocks.

Prison design - Yvonne Jewkes by Lucy Cavendish

My other passion is for creative writing. Getting a literary agent and a publishing contract last year was a huge thrill. My book, provisionally titled Beneath The Yellow Wallpaper: A Memoir of Prison and Home combines a very personal narrative with stories from a career spent in prisons. It is an unusual coming-of-age story that draws lightly on literature, Greek mythology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, history and criminology, to explore prisons, homes and long-term relationships as places of hope and hopelessness, of dreams, love and loss.

I also run an annual creative writing retreat called Freedom to Write with my friend, Andy West, who has written his own memoir, drawing on his experiences of teaching philosophy in prisons. In October, we’re taking the retreat to Bastøy, the famous island prison in Norway, where we’ll teach creative writing to a group of academics from the University of Oslo, and to some of the prisoners there. I recently taught some writing classes in HMP Liverpool and HMP Lincoln too. It was wonderful to see the men flourish creatively. The poems and stories they produced are filled with humour and pathos. There is so much talent and raw humanity behind those dark, impenetrable, walls, and my hope in writing a trade book about the imaginative, humane, light-filled prisons I’ve helped design is to puncture some of the myths about the people who are confined in them. Some of those I’ve met and interviewed over the years have done bad things, but they are not in any uncomplicated sense bad people.

I loved my time at Cambridge and being part of the Lucy community gave me confidence and resourcefulness. I would have felt terribly intimidated if I’d gone to one of the ancient colleges where students in academic gowns still dine by candlelight beneath portraits of elderly, robed men. Lucy Cavendish is a modern, progressive institution, and that suited me.

I’m very proud to be associated with Lucy, and am delighted to see the establishment of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Surely a Lucy Non-Fiction Prize must follow?! I’d love to get involved in the Writing Centre and hope to do a creative writing workshop there later this year. It feels as if my academic career has come full-circle.

Yvonne’s memoir will be published by Scribe in Autumn 2024.

Follow her on Twitter @YvonneJewkes and @F2Wretreats

Freedom to Write offers mentoring and editorial services for narrative non-fiction writers, as well as hosting an annual writing retreat – find out more https://freedomtowrite.co.uk