Designing a Rehabilitative Prison Environment

Abstract

Rehabilitation is a central objective of modern prison design and construction. Yet applied theories of rehabilitation pay insufficient attention to how prison architectural and design factors produce environments that support the process of personal change. In this chapter, we apply an ecological system-oriented approach to present a theoretical framework that explains how the physical, social and psychological elements of a prison environment interact to support or inhibit rehabilitation. The result is an applied multilevel model of prison-based rehabilitation. This model hypothesises that the rehabilitative power of the prison environment emerges when its structural and relational compone..