The “Prison House” and Normalization. Between the Reassertion of Privacy and the Risk of Collectiveness

Abstract

The principle of “normalization” in penology maintains that the life of people in captivity should resemble as far as possible the positive aspects of “normal” life in free society. To critically understand how the theories and practices of normalization impact our discourses about space within and beyond detention institutions, this essay considers the “prison house,” a genre that includes a range of homely, small-scale carceral facilities. The “prison house” attempts to normalize life, often through a process of “home-ification.” In doing so, it sublimates the notion of privacy – in its double modern connotation, as defined by Robin Evans, of solitude and domesticity – and re-introduces collectiveness as a choreographed practice hailed as a tool for reform and as guarantor of a daily social order. This article asks: does the “prison house” mimic or anticipate how free people live together in the residential architecture of the city?

Keywords:

• principle of normalization
• normal and extraordinary
• Prison House
• privacy
• collective living

Acknowledgements

This essay is an outcome of the research project “Territories of Incarceration,” which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 844184​. My sincere gratitude goes to the scholars and practitioners from KU Leuven Department of Architecture, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Criminology Department, and the NGOs De Huizen and Rescaled who have all contributed to and commented on this work in research workshops, email exchanges and informal conversations.

Notes

1. “Penology” is the “study of punishment of crime and of prison management,” Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). The qualification “to the extent possible” reflects the impossibility for normal conditions of life to be fully replicated in captivity. “Normality can … never be complete. Prison life will always be an unusual life,” writes prison governor Hans Jørgen Engbo, “Normalization in Nordic Prisons. From a Prison Governor’s Perspective,” in Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice: Embraced by the Welfare State? ed. Peter Scharff Smith and Thomas Ugelvik (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017), 337. The specification that prison life should emulate the positive aspects of life in free society finds a recent formulation in the Council of Europe’s European Prison Rules 2006, Rule 5: “Life in prison shall approximate as closely as possible the positive aspects of life in the community.” Council of Europe, European Prison Rules (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2006). Scholars and policy advisors Dirk van Zyl Smit and Sonja Snacken further explain that we should avoid bringing inside the prison the social inequalities that characterize free society – see their Principles of European Prison Law and Policy: Penology and Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105.

2. Engbo, “Normalization in Nordic Prisons,” 343.

3. H. De Vos, “The Normalization Principle. A New Perspective on Imprisonment: Comparative Research on the Development and Interpretation of the Normalization Principle and its Impact on the Theory and Practice of Punishment” (Ph.D. diss., KU Leuven Faculteit Rechtsgeleerdheid, 2021), 25.

4. See, for instance, Local Time, Design Guide for Small-Scale Local Facilities. Design Guidelines for Evidence-Based, Best-Practice Youth Justice Facilities in Victoria (Melbourne, Victoria: Local Time, 2019). Available online: https://localtime264843868.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/localtime_designguide_v1-2.pdf (accessed March 2022).

5. It was in conversation with David Cayley that Ivan Illich described the prison as a double of society, referring to correction officers as “cardinals” or “pontiffs” who “preside [over] and organize an extraordinary ceremony in society.”  The prison, Illich says, acts “as a huge ritual which creates a scapegoat which we can drive out into the desert” – see David Cayley, “Prison and its Alternative, Ideas” (1996), podcast: https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2015/6/8/prison-and-its-alternatives-part-five (accessed March 2022).

6. By “home-ification” I mean the deliberate design act of making the interior of institutions homely, of taking the “home” as a positive, harmless reference.

7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977[1975]); Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue. English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

8. From a semi-structured interview conducted with a resident of Pension Skejby on March 6, 2014, by student in anthropology N. De Haan, “Meeting Halfway. Experiences of Convicts and Non-Convicts Living Together in a Danish Halfway House” (Bachelor diss., Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Utrecht University, 2014), 41.

9. Ibid., 41.

10. Linda Kjær Minke, “The Effects of Mixing Offenders with Non-Offenders: Findings from a Danish Quasi-Experiment,” Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 12, no. 1 (2011): 96.

11. Ibid.

12. This is a remark from Linda Kjær Minke in an online conversation with the author, November 10, 2021.

13. Linda Kjær Minke, Skejby-modellen. Et socialt eksperiment om udtynding af kriminelle. En kvalitativ og kvantitativ evaluering (Report for the Danish Ministry of Justice of Denmark, 2006): 22 (my translation). Available online: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/publications/skejby-modellen-et-socialt-eksperiment-om-udtynding-af-kriminelle (accessed March, 2022).

14. Ibid.

15. See, for instance, De Vos, “The Normalization Principle,” 43.

16. Ibid., 44.

17. Engbo, “Normalization in Nordic Prisons,” 343.

18. Ibid., 338.

19. Bengt Nirje and Wolf Wolfensberger, “Reflections on the History of Normalization” (lecture, Syracuse University, Department of Special Education, Syracuse, NY, May 28, 2003), available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wctGjC7x94 (accessed March 2022).

20. See Act no. 192, June 5, 1959. Bank-Mikkelsen’s definition is quoted in Bengt Nirje, “The Normalization Principle and Its Human Management Implications,” The International Social Role Valorization Journal 1, no. 2 (1994[1969]): 19 (revised edition).

21. Bengt Nirje, “The Normalization Principle” (revised ed.): 19.

22. Ibid., 21–22.

23. Wolf Wolfensberger, The Principle of Normalization in Human Services (Toronto: National Institute on Mental Retardation, 1972): 12–25. Wolfensberger describes a historical trajectory for the “deviant” individual, and looks at the names formerly given to that individual: a “subhuman organism,” a “menace,” an “unspeakable object of dread,” an “object of pity,” a “holy innocent,” a “diseased organism,” an “object of ridicule,” and an “eternal child.”

24. Ibid., 45.

25. Ibid., 28.

26. Ibid.

27. See for instance A. Culham and M. Nind, “Deconstructing Normalization: Clearing the Way for Inclusion,” Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability 28, no. 1 (2003): 65–78. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/1366825031000086902 (accessed March, 2022). Culham and Nind note how Wolfensberger will later become aware of this controversy. Blaming the very term “normalization” for its tendency to be easily misunderstood, in the 1980s he will propose changing it to “Social Role Valorization.”

28. Ibid., 71.

29. For an insight into the history of the principle of normalization in penology, see Helene de Vos’ doctoral work, “The Normalization Principle.”

30. Council of Europe, Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, 1973: Art.58, 34; United Nations, Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, 1955: Art.60, 9.

31. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Aldine, 1961).

32. Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). Sykes described the “pains of imprisonment” as: deprivation of liberty, deprivation of autonomy, deprivation of goods and services, deprivation of heterosexual relationships and deprivation of security.

33. De Vos, “The Normalization Principle,” 4, 35.

34. Ibid., 35.

35. Ibid., 39–48.

36. Ibid., 44.

37. Ibid., 314.

38. Niels Erik Bank-Mikkelsen, “A metropolitan area in Denmark: Copenhagen,” in Changing patterns in residential services for the mentally retarded, ed. Robert B. Kugel and Wolf Wolfensberger (Washington, DC: President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, 1969), 227–254; Bengt Nirje, “The Normalization Principle and Its Human Management Implications,” 20–21.

39. Wolfensberger, The Principle of Normalization, 79.

40. Ibid., 80–81. An environment that aims at a “low common denominator” is a space designed with restrictions and specific features appropriate only to a small part of the population, unnecessary for most.

41. This section is based on primary research conducted in the past three years. I have engaged in conversation and collaborated with members of the NGOs De Huizen and Rescaled and participated in the NGOs’ seminars and training sessions. Data regarding the Enghien and Mechelen Transition houses were collected from official sources and media, as well as in interviews with visitors to the houses and a workshop with the Coordinator of the Mechelen Transition House.

42. Kristel Beyens et al., The Houses. Towards a Sustainable Penitentiary Approach (Ghent: vzw De Huizen, 2017).

43. Ibid. These proposals, which were published in the book, are by Belgian architect Ronald De Meyer and his Masters students at UGent. Recently, more architects and architectural students following De Huizen/Rescaled are adding to this discussion with proposals for detention houses. See, for instance, the work by Johanne Dalemark (https://www.wayback.no/et-soningssted/) and Mélanie Bouteille (https://farapej.fr/Projet-pilote). In the faculty of Architecture at KU Leuven, De Huizen’s proposals have been translated into architectural projects for students under the guidance of Gideon Boie: see http://www.prisongear.be/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=51&cntnt01returnid=1.

44. Mateo Kries et al., eds., Together! The New Architecture of the Collective (Vitra Design Museum/Berlin: Ruby Press, 2017), 38–39.

45. G4S Care is a branch of G4S - Group 4 Securitas, an international private security firm founded in 1992 in the UK. Today it manages private prisons and detention centers globally. An ever-increasing list of scandals means that has been denounced in several detention institutions. Yet G4S holds the monopoly in the field of private detention and their established curriculum was key to the award of the contract for running the two Belgian transition houses.

46. By replacing “detention houses” with “transition houses,” where people nearing the end of their sentence are “transitioning” to freedom, the Belgian National Prison Service is expanding rather than shrinking. The new transition houses for low-risk convicted people are being opened concomitantly with new gigantic prison complexes on the peripheries of Belgian cities. The most recent instance of this trend in prison estates is the construction of the Haren Prison Complex on the outskirts of Brussels which will be fully in operation by the end of 2022 to host nearly 1,200 prisoners.

47. Manu Pintelon, “Belgium Takes First Step towards a New Penitentiary Paradigm: The Use of Transition Houses,” Rescaled Blog, June 6, 2020, https://www.rescaled.org/2020/06/06/belgium-takes-first-step-towards-a-new-penitentiary-paradigm-the-use-of-transition-houses/ (accessed March 2022).

48. Bart Somers, Mechelen’s mayor, reported in the official website of the former Minister of Justice Koen Geens: https://www.koengeens.be/news/2019/09/09/eerste-belgische-transitiehuis-opent-deuren-in-mechelen (accessed March 2022).

49. It must be noted that these 17 places in the transition house are very limited in comparison to the total number of people detained in Flanders – about 5000 – and in the whole Belgium – about 10,000.

50. The Coordinator of the Transition House in Mechelen, in discussion with the author (November 2020) explains how they have invested in establishing this relationship, inviting neighbors into the house for informal events and information sessions, and providing services for and support to the adjacent retirement home during the covid-19 crisis. Exceptions to the general praise received by the project are comments from the blog Civis Mundi: coming from a prison abolitionist perspective, Civis Mundi argues that the buildings should have been used instead as affordable housing, thus responding to Belgium’s severe housing crisis. Goukens Lode, “Transitiehuis Tegen Institutionalisering,” Civis Mundi, 87 (2019). Available online: https://www.civismundi.nl/index.php?p=artikel&aid=5315 (accessed March 2022).

51. The two buildings belong to the city and are rented by the Ministry of Justice/G4S. They were previously used as a winter shelter for the homeless. In summer 2019, they were redecorated and furnished for the new purpose.

52. “Het is zomaar een huis in de rij,” quoted in “Hier verlang ik opnieuw naar morgen,” De Standaard, February 22, 2020. Available online: https://traliesuitdeweg.weebly.com/eerste-transitiehuis-in-mechelen.html (accessed March 2022).

53. Official Household Rules, VI Material Terms of Life and VI.1 Room and living area(s) (my translation) published on the official website of De Huizen: https://dehuizen.be/files/Huishoudelijk_reglement_transitiehuis__Mechelen.pdf (accessed November 2020)

54. From the official website of the Belgian Ministry of Justice (my translation): https://justitie.belgium.be/nl/nieuws/persberichten_89 (accessed November 2020).

55. In November 2020 only two guests were hosted in Enghien; it has a full capacity of about 15. In January 2022, the transition house suspended its operation but it is expected to reopen before the end of 2022 under new management.

56. A staff member at Pentonville prison, in discussion with the author, November 2017.

57. Anon, “Boil in a bag pigeon,” InsideTime – The National Newspaper for Prisoners and Detainees, October 1, 2013. Available online: https://insidetime.org/boil-in-a-bag-pigeon/ (accessed March 2022).

58. Sabrina Puddu, “Prisons and Food: From in-Cell Eating and Meal-Lines to Collective and Domestic Kitchens,” Penal Reform International Blog, June 2, 2020, https://www.penalreform.org/blog/prisons-and-food-from-in-cell-eating-and/ (accessed March 2022).

59. Anna Puigjaner, “Bringing the Kitchen Out of the House,” E-Flux Architecture Blog, February 11, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/overgrowth/221624/bringing-the-kitchen-out-of-the-house// (accessed March 2022).

60. The Coordinator of Transition House in Mechelen, in discussion with the author, November 2020.

61. Interviewed by a local newspaper, the house coordinator of Mechelen declared that the focus in the house “is on recovery and learning to live together” after the distorted experience of collective living that imprisoned people have in prisons. “Hier verlang ik opnieuw naar morgen,” De Standaard, February 22, 2020.

62. The videos were filmed by the regional television channels RTV and NOTELE. Available online: https://www.rtv.be/artikels/transitiehuis-lijkt-helemaal-niet-op-een-gevangenis-a72848; https://www.notele.be/it18-media73563-la-premiere-maison-de-transition-de-wallonie-a-ete-inauguree-a-enghien.html?fbclid=IwAR1JzYsmLhIT1IAnEAk4q13uoiNN0xmdUbWzLZJVF1CcLt U79fNhkFJsG9E; https://www.notele.be/it61-media73593-la-maison-de-transition-d-enghien- inauguree-en-presence-du-ministre-de-la-justice-koen-geens.html (accessed March 2022).

63. The Coordinator of the Transition House in Mechelen, in discussion with the author, November 2020.

64. Ibid.

65. Thomas Ugelvik, Power and Resistance in Prison: Doing Time, Doing Freedom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

66. Jennifer Turner and Victoria Knight, eds. The Prison Cell: Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

67. Dogma, “Ichnographia Cellae,” Confinement, ed. gta exhibitions and e-flux Architecture (2020), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/confinement/352071/ichnographia-cellae/ (accessed March, 2022).

68. The quote is taken from a summary in http://www.dogma.name/project/the-room-of-ones-own/ (accessed March 2022). See also Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, Dogma: The Room of One’s Own: The Architecure of the (Private) Room (Milano: Black Square, 2017).

69. Helen Johnston, “‘The Solitude of the Cell:’ Cellular Confinement in the Emergence of the Modern Prison, 1850–1930,” in The Prison Cell, ed. Jennifer Turner and Victoria Knight (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 23–44.

70. Thomas Ugelvik, Power and Resistance in Prison, 113–129.

71. Jana Robberechts and Kristel Beyens, “PrisonCloud: The Beating Heart of the Digital Prison Cell,” in The Prison Cell, ed. Jennifer Turner and Victoria Knight (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

72. Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (New York: Routledge, 2007).

73. This is the argument advanced by sociologist Richard Sennett. See, for instance: Richard Sennett, “Interiors and Interiority” (public lecture, Harvard GSD, Cambridge, MA, April 22, 2016). Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=53&v=hVPjQhfJfKo (accessed March, 2022).

74. Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue, 406.

75. Ibid., 354.

76. Ibid., 71.

77. Ibid., 404.

78. Ibid., 406.

79. Helen Johnston, “‘The Solitude of the Cell’,” 30.

80. Ibid., 31.

81. Council of Europe, European Prison Rules. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2006.The Rules describe both privacy and collectiveness as fundamental rights and seem to suggest that a normalized condition is one ensuring a healthy balance between the two. While the “modern prison” aimed to break association, Rule 27 of the European Prison Rules states the importance for imprisoned people to develop “their social and interpersonal skills.” Rule 50 claims that “unnecessary restrictions to prisoners’ rights to communicate” must be avoided. Rule 18, specifically concerned with “accommodation,” refers to the 11th General Report of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), 2011, on the undesirability of large-capacity dormitories, in favour of single cells. The document specifies that “single cells at night do not imply a limit on association during the day. The benefit of privacy during sleeping hours needs to be balanced with the benefit of human contact at other times.”

82. British prison reformer and member of the British Prison Service Ian Malcolm Dunbar theorised this concept in the 1980s as a reaction to some recent riots in high security British prisons. In 1985 he published the report: U.K. Home Office, A Sense of Direction. Report by Ian Dunbar (London: H.M.P. Leyhill: 1985). Here, “relationship” is defined as the “effective interaction between individuals (or the combination of people within the organization),” where “effective” means the “maximum achievement of aims with the minimum resources” (137). Dunbar states that the key relationship in prison is that between the staff member and the imprisoned person. If this is successful, control and security will flow naturally and effectively. He considers architectural design fundamental to encourage informal contact between staff and prisoners to intermingle, and suggests that the institutional unity of large monobloc prisons should be fragmented into small housing units (22) for a small “manageable group” of about 75 people (42).

83. See Richard Sparks, Anthony Bottoms and Will Hay, Prisons and the Problem of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 32–96, in particular 90, also Anthony E. Bottoms, “Interpersonal Violence and Social Order in Prisons,” Crime and Justice 26 (1999): 205–281.

84. Anthony E. Bottoms, “Interpersonal Violence and Social Order in Prisons,” 213.

85. “Order: an orderly situation is any long-standing pattern of social relations (characterized by a minimum level of respect for persons) in which the expectations that participants have of one another are commonly met, though not necessarily without contestation. Order can also, in part, be defined negatively …. Control: the use of routines and of a variety of formal and informal practices - especially, but not only, sanctions - which assist in the maintenance of order, whether or not they are recognized as doing so.” Ibid., 251.

86. Criminologist Ben Crewe observes that the prison is today governed through the “dissolution of the social” with the atomization and individualization of imprisoned people key to maintain order in prison. Ben Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison. Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

87. M. Talay and B. Pali, “Encountering the C Wing: The Relationship Between Prisoner Self-Governance and ‘Pains of Imprisonment’,” Criminological Encounters 3, no.1 (2020): 117. This ethnographic study was conducted in the open regime wing at the “modern prison” of Mechelen, the prison where most people were held in detention before being transferred to the Mechelen transition house. It observes a “deprivation of community,” paradoxically in an open-regime prison wing where the time spent in communal spaces outside the cell surpasses that spent locked in the cell.

88. The Coordinator of the Transition House in Mechelen, in discussion with the author, November 2020.

89. Nils Christie, Beyond Loneliness and Institutions: Communes for Extraordinary People (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2007[1989]).

90. Ibid., 28.

91. This is David Cayley’s description of the villages. David Cayley, “Beyond Institutions, Nils Christie, Ideas” (1994) podcast: https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2015/8/17/beyond-institutions-part-six (accessed March 2022).

Additional information

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Sabrina Puddu

Sabrina Puddu is an architect, educator and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at KU Leuven, Department of Architecture. Her recent research project “Territories of Incarceration” looks at the architecture of prisons and agrarian penal colonies from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has taught design and history and theory of architecture at institutions including London’s Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins, Leeds Beckett University, and the University of Cagliari. For the Architectural Association she runs the Visiting School Asinara on a former prison island and at KU Leuven she teaches the design studio “This is not a prison farm. Vacant farmland for the settlement of an imperfect community” envisioning proposals for residential farms whose convivial cohabitation is based on principles of restorative and environmental justice.