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Recidivism possesses a significant burden to the criminal justice system, public safety, and economy, draining UK of an estimated 21 billion pounds annually. The thesis investigates the factors that causes ex-convicts to reoffend, indicating factors within and out of the penal system that contributes to recidivism.

The typical journey through the penal system starts with a dehumanizing and expressively punishing confinement instead of the supposed rehabilitative sentence, once released faced with an immense stigma forming a great barrier between employment and accommodation. Forcing many into a corner choosing between homelessness and relative stability within prison. Access to a home has proven to have a substantial impact on ex-convicts’ chance of re-conviction, and found to be, alongside employment, the only factors that lead out of the “revolving prison gates”.

Thus, the thesis intervention answers to the issue through provision of halfway housing and architectural solutions to aid ex-convicts’ reintegration into society. Overcrowding and inefficiency of Victorian prison structures has catalyzed a nationwide reform of prisons, in terms of attitudes to rehabilitation and punishment. In extension architectural form of prisons will change to accommodate a new more dignified approach to rehabilitation, leaving many Victorian prison sites up for development. Taking this opportunity, the project occupies the Cardiff prison site and redesigned into transitionary housing for ex-convicts, the architecture asks for occupants to confront their previous confinement within such spaces or find comfort in its familiarity.

During their time in the temporary housing, they would experience three different modes of dwellings, progressing from ‘alongside’ to ‘confronting’ and finally ‘without’ confinement. Making use of former confining fabrics such us the prison wall, blocks, and cells, and the manipulation of such thresholds to form phenomenologically transitionary environment. Other needs of the demographic are also sensitively incorporated in the design, most significant of which are job searching, skill enhancing, and family mediation.