From the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib, modern jails are clinical and brutal creations. Designed to disorient and diminish inmates, the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland embodies this architectural inhumanity

Donovan Wylie spent 100 days photographing the Maze Prison, ten miles outside Belfast. Built by the British government in 1976, the infamous H-block detention centre closed, after peace negotiations, in October 2003. The buildings continue to stand while Ulster decides what to do with this sad and dismal place. Soon enough, these miles of barbed wire and acres of grim concrete will be razed to make way for - who knows what? A beautiful public park, perhaps. A wildlife sanctuary. A romantic wilderness. If past examples are anything to go by, it will probably be reborn as some glum housing estate, a domestic prison to replace its political predecessor.

Whatever happens to the Maze, Wylie's meticulous, obsessively focused labour will fix for ever in our minds the numbing banality of prison life. Whichever way his camera points, the view is all but identical. Here, 5,000 years of architecture and urban planning have been reduced to a faceless late 20th-century grid. Here is St John the Divine's gridiron city, New Jerusalem, described so enticingly in the Book of Revelations - a thing of gold, onyx and chalcedony - hammered into a vision of purgatory. Here is a construction designed to rob life of imagination, flatten seditious thought, steal away humanity, put an end to time, and even to life itself.

Relentless images of gravelled alleyways set between concrete posts and look-out towers, of single-storey concrete H-blocks and tiny white cells, reflect the outlook of those who designed this architectural white-out: puritanical, zealous and efficient. Parade-square military. Hair cut. Boots polished. Coal painted white for VIP visits. Paper clips lined in precise rows. The Maze was, unforgettably, a place of dirty protest, of shit smeared on walls, of sporadic violence, sudden arson, assassination, dramatic escape and of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, starving to death after 66 foodless days in 1981.

Looking at Wylie's photographs, it is all but impossible to sense this underlying savagery. Modern prisons, unlike medieval dungeons or Piranesi's Renaissance fantasies, are chaste-looking places - from the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib. Inside such prim walls, torture and sadistic perversions can be indulged, on innocent and guilty alike.

Execution chambers in US prisons, designed to be as clinical as possible, share the aesthetic of the operating theatre, or freshly cleaned motorway service station lavatory. The perversions carried out in such places are as sick as the crimes committed by the guilty, as pathetic as the deaths of the innocent. Here are hells of our own making, walled around in DIY wall tiles.

For all this tide of prison porn, one of the most frightening aspects of contemporary jails is their unstated aim to reduce inmates to a hollow state, to lock them up in places that have less character than a new housing estate in the Thames Gateway. The Maze was a prison famous throughout the world, a detention centre for loyalist and republican politicians and gunmen. But as Wylie's pictures show, it might almost have been anywhere. If the skies were bluer, this might be Texas; if there was snow on the ground, it might be Russia.

These deliberately repetitive images remind me of Italo Cal-vino's description of Trude in Invisible Cities (1972): "If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city's name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others . . . following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. Why come to Trude, I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. 'You can resume your flight whenever you like,' they said to me, 'but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.'"

Or it reminds me of Patrick McGoohan's rebellious character, Number 6, in the cult 1960s television series The Prisoner. In the final episode, No 6 breaks free of the picture-book yet nightmarish prison village he has been held in, only to discover that he is his own jailer and that, out of prison, he is still in it.

In Britain today, following the lead of the United States, we are locking up an increasing number of our people, and for the most petty of crimes. The desire is, presumably, to keep people under control, to regiment them, to shut down their imaginations, their capacity to rebel, if not to commit crime, by banging them up in architecture and places as vacuous as the Maze.

In a perceptive essay in the book accompanying Wylie's photographs, Louise Purbrick writes that one of the main purposes of the design of the Maze was to disorient and diminish prisoners through an infinite repetition of spaces, materials and control systems. To make the Maze even more of a non-place, its 2.5 miles of 17ft-high walls were built on 270 acres of low-lying bog. So even if there had been views of the outside world, these would have been bleak and minimal. The prefabricated buildings were as colourless as they could be, although (a very British touch) they were hung with floral curtains.

Each building, including the chapel, was imprisoned within the prison, in a barbed-wire cage. A cat's cradle of wires was strung across the entire site to prevent lightplanes, or angels, landing inside this little piece of hell on earth. Guards, as well as the 10,000 prisoners who passed through the Maze, found it depressing. Up to 50 committed suicide, Purbrick reports, some using the guns they were issued to keep them safe from attack inside the walls.

The design of the Maze was modelled not on any Nazi German, Soviet Russian or Ba'athist Iraqi precedent, but on US practice. Curtis & Davis, a firm of New Orleans architects, designed the new, prefabricated Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after one too many riots condemned the old prison to closure in 1955. Their pioneering work was adopted in England at Channing Wood, Devon (1972), Deerbolt, Co Durham (1973), and Featherstone, Staffordshire (1976), at a time when concrete prefabrication was all the rage in the design of housing, hospitals, universities and prisons.

This was a long way from Pentonville and Dartmoor, yet the Maze was, in its own terms, a failure. The attempt to wear down prisoners, held without trial, in such numbingly boring conditions led to a rich culture of resistance, the full story of which has yet to be written. A richness of imagination made up for a poverty of place, a negation of design and architecture.

Prisons, whether Gormenghast-like or Maze-like, are for the most part dumb and brutal creations. There is no need to lock up the number of people that we do. Nevertheless, as events of recent weeks have stressed, we appear to enjoy controlling, humiliating and abusing people we have power over. And as Wylie's images of the Maze prove, we continue to lack the imagination to reduce the occasion for crime and political strife.

"Donovan Wylie: the Maze" is at the Photographers' Gallery, London WC2 (020 7831 1772) from 10 June to 1 August. The accompanying book is published by Granta

Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic

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