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Despite everything, Victorian prisons like Liverpool and Lincoln are still here. Tenacious and enduring, the persistence of these structures means they carry the impress of the past down the years. Scars and gaps in paint and brickwork, the filled-in trace of a candle alcove, ducting for electric cables and water pipes show how successive generations have tried to adapt old buildings for a new modern world. The sheer age of whitewashed walls and cells means that they carry further memories of past lives – recent and long gone, visible and spectral. These lives haunt the experience of living and working in prison today, just as the fabric of Victorian institutions continues to define what we think prison is now and what it should be in the future.