Reconstructing a women's prison

by Paul Elliott Rock

The rebuilding of Holloway Prison announced in 1968 was intended to be of enormous significance for the treatment and therapeutic rehabilitation of women inmates. Reconstruction began in 1970, but the new prison was not completed until 1985, by which time penal ideologies had changed. The prison department had revised its conceptions of women's criminality, and what had been intended to be a new therapeutic prison had become a place of conventional discipline and containment. These developments created serious problems within the prison and led to Holloway being identified as a public and political scandal. Using original documents and extensive interviews, the author traces the genesis and consequences of the decision to rebuild England's major prison for women, and shows how the experiment at Holloway reflects shifting attitudes towards female criminals, and the relations between penal ideology, architecture, control, and behaviour in a penal establishment.