Proportional Justice

IPIC 2024 Presentation by Alex Newman (IPIC2024-PID023)

Author

Alex Newman

Architect/ Director, Xsquared Architects, Australia

Alex Newman is a director of Xsquared Architects a practice based in the island state of Tasmania in Australia. Initially trained and qualified in London, England he moved to Hobart in 2008. Alex, has always had a deep-seated interest in correctional architecture since completing his dissertation on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon at university. The move to Hobart afforded him the opportunity to work alongside some of Australia’s most preeminent correctional architects. Over the last 15 years his knowledge and experience has progressively increased as he has worked on multiple correctional projects of varying sizes culminating in the recent $85m Southern Remand Centre.

He believes passionately that prisons and justice infrastructure more generally should be designed with rehabilitation and trauma informed design principals at the heart. His mantra is that we should build fewer prisons, but those we do, need to be design significantly better to help reduce ongoing recidivism rates. Lessons from other architectural typologies such as schools and university accommodation could and should be considered in correctional design to create environments which look and feel nothing like the prisons of the past.

In 2020, he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research best practice prisons in Scandinavia and across Europe. This research was completed in 2023 and involved not only visiting the prisons themselves but interviewing the architects to get a fuller understanding of the design process and its constraints and opportunities.

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