Abstract

Prison design is crucial to the relationship between the ‘carceral’ and the state, in that it is the process which determines, in large part, how the goals of a criminal justice system are materially expressed (Moran 2015). With this in mind, this chapter takes forward the notion of prison buildings as coded, scripted entities, exploring the design of prisons and the intentions behind their operation in terms of the imperatives of states and their criminal justice systems. It pursues the notion that the design of carceral space has a significant role to play in understanding the extent to which the aims of a carceral system are translated into experiences of imprisonment.