The Ministry of Justice has also confirmed new house blocks - mini-prisons with places for 1,260 inmates - at four sites across England. HMP Shrewsbury in Shropshire was put on the market earlier this year Photo Credit: James O. Lend Lease has been selected to build Wrexham and the project is expected to cost £212m. This modern 2000-capacity prison will be built in Wrexham, North Wales, and a second large prison is planned for the southeast of England.
Since 2010, a slew of run-down British prisons have been declared 'surplus to requirements' according to the Ministry of Justice, in part to reduce the prison budget by £30m a year and in part to make way for a contentious new 'super prison' (due to open by late 2017). HMP Canterbury was sold for £7m to Canterbury Christ Church University. But with prisons closing at a rate of around three a year, what happens to these out-of-date, often badly constructed and overcrowded buildings? Unlikely 'reforms' to these structures - originally designed to house the more villainous and dangerous members of society - have yielded luxury hotels or even student accommodation. Today, many of the buildings housing the inmates of the UK's modern prison system are still ancient Victorian fortresses, designed to contain, regiment and punish. Philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham introduced the idea of the Panopticon in the late eighteenth century, characterised by the principle of observation and arranged in a circular pattern so the guards could see into all of the cells from an observation tower. The unlikely future for these buildings, which range from Victorian gaols and medieval fortresses to Sixties’ institutional blocks, could be in the form of hotels or even student accommodation.ĭraughty galleries with lines of closely packed cells and echoing sounds of locking doors: this is the vision of prisons in popular imagination - think Ronnie Barker in Porridge or Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. Declared ‘surplus to requirements’ by the Ministry of Justice, they are now being sold off to developers. Since 2010 more than a dozen prisons in the UK have closed their doors.