About this project

Plan of Milbank Prison, 1828, G.P. Holford, An Account of Millbank Penitentiary

The reality and complexity of prison is often misunderstood.

We want to accurately represent life in prison.

We want to do this by telling the story of the evolution of prison design and parts of prison life from the opening of Millbank prison in 1816 to today.

We will look for data that gets at the fabric of prison. We will look at the design, functioning and experience of prison.

Questions we want to answer include: how many are there? Who is in them? For how long? Who built them? What is their size? Where does it come from? How much do they cost? What can you do in them? What does the wider public think about them? Why are they built as they are? How have they changed over time?