Healthy Prisons. Therapeutic Outdoor Environments within a Prison Setting

Correction facilities are among the most eccentric spaces available in our urban, peri-urban, or rural fabrics. Their physical environments show a great variety, from open grounds, where the absence of walls and fences makes it challenging to determine where the outside ends and the inside begins, to highly secured closed facilities. These correction facilities are separated from their surroundings, and inside the walls, the physical environment is segregated, austere and grey, leading to severe consequences for the health and well-being of prisoners. However, prison environments can be seen as nurturing rather than punitive settings, that might heal rather than harm. Custodial settings may assist in establishing a contemporary form of therapeutic environment.

Therapeutic design has been utilised in healthcare facilities for years and the knowledge of how nature can considerably influence mental health and the well-being of patients is heavily documented. With mental health becoming an increasingly growing concern within society, means to increase well-being and treat mental illness are adopted mainly within design work. With correction facilities having lasting effects on prisoners’ mental health and the majority already diagnosed with a mental illness, therapeutic environments are yet to be included in the design of these facilities, where these environments can help with rehabilitation and help decrease recidivism when integrating back into society. This research aims to speculate what a therapeutic environment may look like in a prison setting and create a design toolkit that caters to the therapeutic and rehabilitative qualities of prison environments. This will be addressed through a bicultural lens, incorporating Rongoā Māori and relevant Māori health models as guidance.