“Osborne’s policy move came after justice secretary Michael Gove tagged these gloomy old nicks “ageing and ineffective”, replete with “bullying, drug-dealing and violence”, and the idea draws from Gove’s think-tank Policy Exchange’s 2013 report Future Prisons, which proposed a programme of high-tech “hub” prisons deploying “cutting-edge architecture”, each housing up to 3,000 inmates in “campus-style” units around centralised services. They’d have “resettlement” aspects built in, wider community and share sites with other parts of the criminal justice system,” said the report, and the Government’s heritage body Historic England isn’t, says a spokeswoman, “opposed to the sale and re-use of historic prison buildings, provided that any new development is done sensitively to the distinctive character and history of the buildings”.”