Can a Prison Ever Feel Like Home? – With Professor Yvonne Jewkes
5/14/20261 hr 7 min
The spaces we inhabit shape who we become. But what does that mean for the people who have no choice where they live?
Yvonne Jewkes is a professor of criminology, author, and leading expert on prison architecture.
She has spent her career studying what echoing corridors, metal doors and harsh fluorescent lighting do to the people living inside prisons — and designing spaces that restore rather than punish.
This conversation is also very personal. Yvonne spent more than a decade restoring a crumbling Regency townhouse, only for her partner to leave midway through the project. The house became tangled up with grief and the slow unravelling of the relationship itself.
We explore the strange overlap between prisons and homes: the human need for dignity, sanctuary and control over our surroundings and the instinct to create beauty even in the bleakest places.
If you enjoyed this conversation, Yvonne's book An Architecture of Hope: reimagining the prison, restoring a house, rebuilding myself is a powerful exploration into the universal need for sanctuary.
To hear more from us:
YouTube: Subscribe to our channel, Homing with Matt, to watch the video version
Patreon: www.patreon.com/HomingWithMatt
Instagram: @homingwithmatt
Contact: Email us at hello@mattgibberd.com
Matt Gibberd’s book, A Modern Way to Live, is available here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320176/a-modern-way-to-live-by-gibberd-matt/9780241480496
Music by @simeonwalkermusic
Identity & design by @lena.winkler.creative.office
Produced by @podshoponline
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsYvonne Jewkes· Guest0:01
[gentle music] Prisons are environments that are designed to strip identity away completely and individuality. Anything that you can do to give that back, it becomes more significant than we on the outside can possibly imagine. Just being able to flick that switch and put your own light on and turn it off, you know, is, is huge. If we take a group of already damaged people and surround them with ugliness and brutality, what do we expect? You know, what are going to be the consequences of that? It seems blindingly obvious to me. When I visited my friend Nick in prison, I thought about what I was gonna wear, and I wore a cashmere jumper because I knew that when we saw each other, we would hug each other. And it, and it was something that went through my mind that actually he gets so little opportunity to feel softness on his hands.
Matt Gibberd· Host0:58
Hello. Welcome back to Homing. Today's guest is Professor Yvonne Jewkes, who's one of the world's leading experts on prison architecture. For decades now, she's studied the environments we create for punishment; the echoing corridors, metal doors, and harsh fluorescent lighting of prisons, and the effect that those spaces have on the people who live inside them. Her work is rooted in the idea that buildings shape us emotionally as well as physically. Things like light,