It costs about $150,000 a year to keep someone inside prison and last year the total number of prisoners in New Zealand crossed 10,000 for the first time in four years.
That number is expected to keep rising and so the Government is expanding our prisons to accommodate.
No longer are prisons just concrete walls with bars on the windows; they are multi-million dollar facilities which can house over 1000 people.
Someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about how we build prisons is criminologist Yvonne Jewkes.
Yvonne has helped design prisons in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and is an advocate of prison architecture that is more humane and rehabilitative.
Her new book An Architecture of Hope explores how the spaces we inhabit might nurture or damage us and how can people start over after the worst has happened?
She speaks to Emile Donovan about why we need to think humanely about the design of our prisons.
Photo: Scribe publishing
