I often find myself lost when I walk through London these days. My references – age-old waypoints like pubs, estates and post offices – have been razed, replaced by cranes and foremen in hi-viz jackets, or turned into new “creative hubs”, erected in what seems like less than a fortnight. Rapid redevelopment is rampant.

Now, Michael Gove plans to close Victorian prisons in the city centre – including Pentonville – and sell the sites to developers for luxury hotels and housing, while relocating prisoners to new “super jails” in far-flung regions of the UK.

Having spent a year across three of the four large Victorian London jails, I can affirm that the atmosphere was oppressive, drugs were ubiquitous and violence was common – as it is throughout the prison system.

The saving grace was that despite the bars on the windows, you could still feel a connection with your home, your city, the metropolis, the radio stations, and the traffic outside. But most importantly, my friends and family were close and could visit regularly.

After six months of moving around various London prisons, like everyone in the prison system, I was finally categorised. The usual small scrap of paper announcing that I’d be moved to the other side of the country at dawn was anonymously slipped under my door after our cells had been locked for the night.

The next day, as we trundled up the slow lane of the M1, we called between our compartments discussing rumours about our new digs. One guy said you can’t get a decent radio signal because it’s out in the sticks. But passing reference was made to worries about how it would be too far for our families to come and visit.

Prisoners’ families are completely innocent, but serve a huge emotional sentence of their own. My now ex-girlfriend suffered endlessly as a result of my move. Rather than being a tube ride away she now needed to take an £80 train ride and the day off work. I used to have more visitors than available slots for visits, but I was lucky to receive one visit every fortnight in the super prison because of the distance. I felt extremely distressed and increasingly vengeful towards the system that was causing the support of my loved ones and my connection to the outside world to wither.

Demolishing city-centre prisons and building huge human warehousing far from people’s support networks is undoubtedly going to lead to some of the poorest and most unsupported people travelling further to be face-to-face with their loved ones.

Approximately 240,000 children in the UK have a parent in jail at any one time. I can’t imagine how I would handle this situation if I was a parent. Just because someone’s mother or father committed a crime, it does not mean that they should have their parental relationship (one that may well serve as a salutation to stay on the straight and narrow, besides everything else that a parent offers) stolen from them by the prison system.

Prison has a dual effect on masculine identity. On the one hand it makes you “act like a man” in the worst ways; you’re encouraged to be emotionally Teflon-coated, to never crack a smile and definitely never shed a tear. On the other, prison takes away your positive responsibilities as a man; you’re rendered unable to care or provide for your partner or children.

These new prisons are in similar places to distribution warehouses, and the prisoners themselves are treated much like palettes of items. In fact, they’re treated worse: boxes of Monster Munch have a retail value at the end of the supply chain and are therefore treated with care. But prisoners have no immediate value – they unfairly play the bogeyman in the tabloid pantomime.

The way central London prices affect those unanchored by property ownership is fickle. Prisons are becoming luxury hotels, factories become art galleries, warehouses are being converted into trendy living spaces ... and prisoners are carelessly slung to distant industrial estates hundreds of miles from where they have a true value.

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