Designing ‘Healthy’ Prisons for Women: Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care and Practice (TICP) into Prison Planning and Design
Yvonne Jewkes 
1
Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7JP, UK
2
School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
3
Department of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, UK
4
School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Falmer BN1 9PH, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16(20), 3818; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16203818 (registering DOI)
Received: 5 September 2019 / Revised: 22 September 2019 / Accepted: 23 September 2019 / Published: 10 October 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing)
There has been growing acknowledgment among scholars, prison staff and policy-makers that gender-informed thinking should feed into penal policy but must be implemented holistically if gains are to be made in reducing trauma, saving lives, ensuring emotional wellbeing and promoting desistance from crime. This means that not only healthcare services and psychology programmes must be sensitive to individuals’ trauma histories but that the architecture and design of prisons should also be sympathetic, facilitating and encouraging trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive practices within. This article problematises the Trauma-Informed Care and Practice (TICP) initiatives recently rolled out across the female prison estate, arguing that attempts to introduce trauma-sensitive services in establishments that are replete with hostile architecture, overt security paraphernalia, and dilapidated fixtures and fittings is futile. Using examples from healthcare and custodial settings, the article puts forward suggestions for prison commissioners, planners and architects which we believe will have novel implications for prison planning and penal practice in the UK and beyond.
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Keywords:
wellbeing; mental health in prisons; women’s health; trauma; Trauma Informed Care and Practice
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Jewkes, Y.; Jordan, M.; Wright, S.; Bendelow, G. Designing ‘Healthy’ Prisons for Women: Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care and Practice (TICP) into Prison Planning and Design. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 3818.
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