Meat grinder

Medium

Text

Form

Interview quote

Artist / Maker

Prisoner, HMP/YOI Lincoln

It feels like you’re walking into a meat grinder, to be honest with you, in a way. Obviously compared to other prisons, modern prisons, you look at them and think it doesn’t look that bad, it just looks like a building, just your normal plain old building, don’t think anything of it, really. […] Whereas this jail, you’re coming into it and you’re actually taking it in, you’re actually looking at the building and you’re thinking “wow, fucking hell, this is scary.” […] When you first come into prison and you walk on a landing. In these jails where it’s four landings, you walk onto the landing and … you’ve got the twos, three, and fours, and there’s loads of people just hanging over the railing looking at you. Coming into jail and that happening will be the scariest time of your life, I promise anybody that, I guarantee it. Unless you’re a big old lump and you don’t care about anything. But that will be the scariest time of your life when people are whistling and shouting down because you’re new. That’s when you’ve really got to show your balls, in a sense … it’s like “bam, I’m here.”

– Prisoner, HMP/YOI Lincoln

Why have we collected this work?

We want to understand what these prisons are like to live and work in, and how has this changed over time. We are examining the ways that these prison buildings carry traces of the past, while operating in the present day.

The project considers how and why these buildings have survived for so long, and asks how we will know when they have reached the end of their operational lives. We consider the significance of the Victorian prison in shaping public and professional ideas of what prison should be like. Crucially, this project explores the implications of the continued operation of Victorian-era prisons for the contemporary prison service, and aims to inform policy development.

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