31 of England’s Prisons are Victorian. Do They work? – The Guardian Visual Investigation

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Many jails still in use today were built by the Victorians. Here’s how their 19th-century design is contributing to a 21st-century crisis.

England in the 1840s was a place of dizzying industry, rapid urbanisation and technological progress.

Among the proliferation of inventions, a new type of building was unveiled to the world. A prison, K-shaped with long corridors made of sure, thick walls, and small windows in cold, solitary cells.

But while most of the industrial mainstays of 19th-century design have since faded into sepia-tinted vestiges of Victoriana, prisons like Pentonville are far from redundant – in fact they have never been busier.

Today, Britain is the most incarcerated country in western Europe. Incredibly, 31 of the jails still in operation in England and Wales were built by the Victorians. They house about 22,000 prisoners, a quarter of the prison population.

Inside, their damp, crowded, poorly ventilated cells have become a symbol of the prison system in this country. And the system is in crisis. Violent disorder, phones, drugs and drone smuggling are all urgent issues on HMP’s agenda.

In this investigation we explore how centuries-old design is failing those who suffer at the hands of this very modern crisis.

Victorian prisons were designed to reform inmates through silent, solitary contemplation in cells which were arranged to keep them isolated. Cells were built to house one prisoner, alone.

But as the prison population in England and Wales has ballooned over the centuries, the days when all prisoners were allocated their own individual cell have faded into memory. While the Victorians built or extended 90 prisons to accommodate about 20,000 people, currently there are 122 prisons in total for a population of more than 80,000.

In these conditions prisoners share confined spaces. In 17 out of 31 Victorian prisons in use, more than half of inmates are held in crowded accommodation – defined as two people sharing a cell that is meant to be for one person only.

In some jails, like Durham, Usk, Wandsworth and Swansea, it is more than 75% of the prison population.

How much space should a prisoner have? The answer is not easy to find. The Prison Service instructions and frameworks provide no minimum measurements for cells, but the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) recommends that a multi-occupancy cell should provide at least 4 sq metres of living space per prisoner, not including a sanitary facility.

The HM Prisons Inspectorate calculates that, as a sanitary facility is about 1-2 sq metres, the cell should offer 4.5 sq metres per person. In 2017, they found that the majority of cells they inspected that year did not meet this standard.

Small shared cells are more frequently found in Victorian prisons. In a shared cell measured at HMP Brixton each prisoner had 3.36 sq metres of space – about the size of a small elevator.

Cramming prisoners in cells means being creative with the use of space. Guidance for arranging furniture in single cells that need to house more than one prisoner shows how a typical Victorian-built single cell might be arranged when shared by two people. This diagram from the 2012 Prison Service instruction shows stacked beds placed across from small wardrobes with a screen dividing the sleeping area and the toilet.

The Ministry of Justice said this diagram was no longer applicable as the 2012 PSI was superseded by a 2022 accommodation framework. This new framework does not provide minimum measurement requirements for cells, however.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons found in surveys conducted in 2017 that while some prisoners had positive experiences of cell-sharing, for others it caused stress.

Ministers despair at the state of the prison estate across England and Wales, and the crumbling Victorian jails that still house more than a quarter of inmates.

After July’s general election, evidence of neglect and dilapidation was everywhere and has been backed by reports from Taylor, the prisons watchdog. He uncovered examples of rat and pigeon infestations, damp and mould. Walls at HMP Winchester were so wet that prisoners could remove their own cell doors or dig through with plastic cutlery.

But in the short to medium term, Victorian prisons must be kept open, officials have said. Why? Because current projections show that the prison population is predicted to reach 100,000 by 2029.

There is no way that the speed of Ministry of Justice’s building programme will mean that any of the 19th-century prisons could be closed by 2029.

Instead, the government has committed to refurbishing the Victorian estate, which officials claim will “bring around 1,000 cells into the 21st century”.

By the end of this year, it also expects to bring back online about 350 places in Victorian prisons that are out of use. New prisons are being built while new blocks are being added to existing prisons. The government has set itself a target of building 14,000 more prison places by 2031.

In March, the category C jail HMP Millsike was opened in East Yorkshire for 1,500 inmates.

Unlike Victorian prisons, it includes workshops and training facilities aimed at getting offenders into work on release and reinforced barless windows to deter drone activity, hundreds of CCTV cameras and X-ray body scanners.

Another 700 places are being built at HMP Highpoint near Haverhill, Suffolk, which will make it the largest prison in the UK.

At the same time, a review of sentencing by former Tory justice secretary David Gauke is expected to recommend in late spring including scrapping shorter sentences and treating more offenders in the community alternatives to jail.

And so Victorian prisons will remain in use for many years along with their associated problems.