Experts from the custodial sector said early consideration of the flow of people and goods had created significant service benefits in PPP prisons. These issues are intimately connected with the purpose of the facility in question:
"The sort of questions we ask ourselves are: 'do we need to accommodate lorries coming in and out of the facility - as we would in a training prison, where you get a lower volume of people movement, but more vehicle traffic - or is there more people movement, as there is in an educational prison?'"
PPP prisons have a smaller design footprint than public sector prisons because they are planned to be more efficient, even though they provide the same facilities as the old and larger public sector prisons:
"[In an educational prison] we have to provide education on a daily basis for all prisoners. So it's important to have easy access between the education block and the housing wings. We designed our prisons so that the education accommodation is next to the housing wings, so less distance has to be covered when moving prisoners there, which saves time. On the other hand, food is usually brought to the prisoners, so the catering block can be located on the opposite side of the building from the housing wings."
Designing the prisons with a more efficient layout minimises the number of staff required to move prisoners around the facility, which makes the establishments less costly to operate.
However, there are wider benefits: because it takes less time to move prisoners around the building, less time is lost from the 'regime' hours spent in training, education and other out-of-cell activities. There are therefore 'decency' benefits from design innovations of this kind.
Similarly, simple steps such as locating showers and telephones on the housing wings have made PPP prisons more efficient than older facilities, since fewer staff are required to manage prisoner movement. It is also more convenient from prisoners' point of view, since they can shower or use telephones more easily without having to be escorted there and back:
"In the public sector, prisoners used to get a shower once a week, and they had to book for it. Our guys can have a shower whenever they happen to be on the wing…It provides a more normalised environment - if you were at home, you could have a shower whenever you felt like it."
"By locating telephones and showers close to cells, we have changed how we think about the allocation of prisoners' time… We can focus on activities aimed at crime reduction rather than spending time in unlock, escorting prisoners to and from showers…"
Participants felt there was a significant difference between the innovations that have been achieved in the privately-designed and managed prisons and some of the more modern prisons built by the public sector. Referring to one of the later publicly-designed prisons
"It's hugely over-specified; everything's on a large scale; it has lots of individual offices for staff, and those offices are quite a large size; there's lots of dead space - in the back office and even in the main jail; it's a long walk to anywhere, it's spread out, so it's expensive to run; the house blocks have lots of open space - which you have to heat… the noise reverberates around the space, so it's a noisier space; it's difficult to maintain - the ceilings are high, so how do you get up to change a light bulb?; the offices are divorced from the gates, so there are no sight lines..."