“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 [eg, courts] 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”.”
