Dr Kirstin Anderson, lecturer in criminology at Edinburgh Napier University, and Professor Yvonne Jewkes, one of the world’s leading authorities on prison architecture at the University of Bath, joined forces under the deft guidance of poet and long-time prison educator Lorna Calley-Sitole for a powerful conversation about prisons, punishment and the possibilities for change.
It was an event that didn’t shy away from hard questions. Instead, it peeled back the layers of bricks and practices to expose the deep tensions between hope and harm in criminal justice – and hinted at something even more radical: a future beyond prison walls.
Kirstin Anderson opened by pulling no punches. Before the lauded Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU) of the 1970s, Scottish prisons had their own version of medieval cruelty: the ‘cages’ of Inverness, where prisoners were locked in steel boxes within their cells – often for years – under the guise of managing violence. Unsurprisingly, this brutality bred only further brutality.
The BSU was meant to break that cycle. A small, experimental unit, it replaced violence with therapeutic approaches, offering prisoners autonomy, creative expression, and – radically – respect. As Anderson’s 2024 edited collection, Barlinnie Special Unit: Art, Punishment and Innovation, reveals, the Unit’s art programmes, led by pioneering art therapist Joyce Laing, became internationally renowned, not just for the quality of the work produced, but for the glimpses of humanity it restored.
The power of the Unit is encapsulated in a single, pivotal moment: when Jimmy Boyle, once considered Scotland’s most violent prisoner, was handed a pair of scissors – not as a weapon, but as a tool to open a parcel. It wasn’t a test. It was trust. And it changed everything.
When we treat people like animals, we should not be surprised if they act accordingly. But when we treat people as human beings, with needs, talents, hopes, and histories, we open the door to transformation. This is the very ethos of the Barlinnie Special Unit, says Anderson.
Professor Yvonne Jewkes took the baton next, transporting the audience to Halden Prison in Norway, often lauded as the ‘most humane prison in the world.’ With its lush green spaces, art-strewn walls, and thoughtful design, Halden offers a powerful reminder: the loss of liberty is the punishment; the environment need not be punitive too.
Yet, Jewkes cautioned against romanticising even the best-designed prisons. A tree-lined courtyard is still a cage if you cannot walk freely among it. A soft bed doesn’t negate the ache of enforced captivity. The architecture of hope can only go so far when the foundations are built on deprivation, coercion and violence.
In Cork Prison, Jewkes noted, even architectural improvements were met with resistance by prisoners, who mourned the loss of the familiarity – and perverse comfort – of the old, harsher environment. A testament not to the success of old prisons, but to the profound institutionalisation wrought by incarceration itself.
Jewkes’ work on Scotland’s new women’s prison in Stirling, a ‘trauma-informed’ facility, acknowledges these contradictions. Yes, design matters. But as Jewkes herself made clear, the true question is not how we build prisons, but who we choose to lock away in them.
As the event drew to a close, Kirstin Anderson read from her book’s conclusion:
“The building of HMP [Glasgow which will be Scotland’s biggest ever prison] is a reminder to us that not understanding the significance of the BSU, its strengths and its weaknesses, has resulted in lessons unlearned and an unquestioning allegiance to the use of imprisonment in Scotland, and to the ever-expanding growth of the prison population. We hope this book can re-open dialogue about the BSU and that it will inspire further research and study of this unique time in Scottish penal history.”
As applause broke out, Lorna opened the floor to questions.
The discussion turned explicitly to abolition when an audience member asked the question that hovered, unspoken, above the entire conversation:
“Given what you have just read, and what we now know, why is penal abolition still such a marginal idea in criminology?”
Kirstin Anderson smiled. “I was asking myself the same question only this morning. I’m thinking about writing a paper, ‘who’s afraid of penal abolition?’” She argued that abolition isn’t about simply swinging open the prison gates overnight. It’s not about emptying the jails without consideration of risk. It is about dismantling the whole punitive logic that underpins the entire system, the hierarchies of power, the cycles of harm, the structures that insist caging human beings is somehow a solution to deeper social problems.
Yvonne Jewkes, while stopping short of full abolitionism, conceded that at least half of the prison population could disappear overnight without any negative impact on public safety. As she put it with a wry smile, “I’m still waiting for a call from Lord Timpson”. Her honesty about the limits of ‘trauma-informed’ prisons – that too often, the concept is little more than window-dressing – was a rare and refreshing note of candour.
The conversation moved towards prison education with a question from the audience. Both Anderson and Jewkes pointed to the glaring paradox: Scotland boasts learning centres in every prison, yet most incarcerated people will never set foot inside them. Chronic understaffing and systemic neglect have reduced these spaces of potential transformation to little more than monuments to lost opportunity through underfunding and lack of ambition.
As Yvonne Jewkes put it, “In order to be effective, educational spaces must look and feel like real places of learning, they should look like actual classrooms, the ones you find in schools and universities.”
The general consensus is that we are moving backwards, clinging to a model of mass incarceration that has long since revealed itself to be a moral and practical failure.
The Barlinnie Special Unit taught us that even in the bleakest places, new worlds are possible. The real failure is not that the BSU ended. The real failure is that we dared so little to dream beyond it.
Joe Smith.
