Twenty-one

Medium

Text

Form

Interview quote

Artist / Maker

Prisoner, B Wing, HMP Liverpool

I’m from The Wirral. I hit twenty-one in YP jail, once you’re twenty-one then you get moved to The Big House, which happened to me, and I was absolutely shitting it. “Oh, you’re going to The Big House. You’re going to a proper man’s jail”, which it is: it’s a man’s jail […] But when I got here, even though it was a dirty jail, and you don’t get much now but you didn’t get much back then, it was more sociable, as in you could speak and have a conversation. Whereas in the YP jails, you had gangs, you had kids bullying younger kids. You were on your own, dog eat dog. In here, it’s more chilled, it’s more relaxed. But when it goes off, it can go off, it can go bad.

– Prisoner, B Wing, HMP Liverpool

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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