This handbook brings together expertise from a range of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts to address a key question facing prison policymakers, architects and designers – what kind of carceral environments foster wellbeing, i.e. deliver a rehabilitative, therapeutic environment, or other ‘positive’ outcomes?

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design offers insights into the construction of custodial facilities, alongside consideration of the critical questions any policymaker should ask in commissioning the building of a site for human containment. Chapters present experience from Australia, Chile, Estonia, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – jurisdictions which vary widely in terms of the history and development of their prison systems, their punitive philosophies, and the nature of their public discourse about the role and purpose of imprisonment, to offer readers theories, frameworks, historical accounts, design approaches, methodological strategies, empirical research, and practical approaches.

1. Introduction.- 2. That Time We Tried to Build the Perfect Prison: Learning from Episodes Across U.S. Prison History.- 3. Defining the Mechanisms of Design: An Interdisciplinary Approach.-  4. Custodial Design: Collective Methods.- 5. What works least worst? A personal account of two new prison design projects.- 6. The Creative Prison Revisited.- 7. Prison Design: Between Pragmatic Engagement and the Dream of Decarceration.- 8. Prison architecture in Chile: A Critical Realist analysis of prison architectural outputs through the lens of organised hypocrisy theory.- 9. The Architecture and Design of the Communist and Post-Communist Prison in Europe.- 10. Challenges and Solutions in Establishing the Impact of Custodial Design.- 11. Evaluating Correctional Environments: A Critical psychosociospatial Approach.- 12. Toward a Dignified Design: O-T-I, S-L-S, and Experience in Carceral Space.- 13. A model for the design of youth custodial facilities: Key characteristics to promote effective treatment.- 14. Designing a Rehabilitative Prison Environment.- 15. How Prison Spaces Work on Bodies: Prison Design in the Norwegian Youth Units.- 16. Does Design Matter? An environmental psychology study in youth detention.- 17. Prisoners with severe mental illnesses and everyday prison interior (re)design.- 18. Autoethnographic Analyses of Prison Design’s Impacts.- 19. Culture Change within Facilities that Incarcerate.- 20. Gendered Inconsiderations of Carceral Space.- 21. A Cultural Competence Framework for Corrections in Hawai’i.- 22. From Grey to Green: Guidelines for Designing Health-Promoting Correctional Environments.- 23. Does nature contact in prison improve wellbeing? Greenspace, self-harm, violence and staff sickness absence in prisons in England and Wales.- 24. Designing green prisonscapes in Norway: Balancing considerations of safety and security, rehabilitation and humanity.- 25. Prioritizing accountability and reparations: Restorative justice design and infrastructure.- 26. Made in Prison – Understanding knowledge exchange, co-design and production of cell furniture with prisoners to reimagine prison industries for safety, wellbeing, and sustainability.