‘Dartmoor has a large segregation unit (46 cells) in a forbidding granite-walled wing, described by the present governor as “medieval”…[Prisoners] are exercised one at a time in what all staff referred to as “pens”. At the time we were there, if they were distressed or suicidal and needed to see a Listener (a Samaritan-trained prisoner)…they were locked in a “Listeners’ suite”, which was in fact a cage: a wire enclosure with a Perspex square through which they could communicate their problems. Both the pens and the cage were degrading and more appropriate for dangerous animals than for potentially suicidal medium to low risk prisoners. When we reported our concerns about the cage, we were told that the Governor had instructed that it be closed some weeks previously…
‘There was frequent use of control and restraint and special cells…We followed a particular incident [in which a] mentally ill prisoner who had threatened an officer was being moved within the segregation unit to a special cell…Other prisoners in the Unit were clearly shaken and frightened…We believe that there may have been excessive use of Control and Restraint in this incident, and that more officers than necessary had been directly involved. Among them were seven officers wearing Control and Restraint equipment. A Health Care officer and a Governor had been in attendance…After all staff had left the cell the prisoner was left lying naked on the floor’. Report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons into an Unannounced Follow-up Investigation of Dartmoor Prison, published November 2001.
The recent Chief Inspector’s report reveals the shocking conditions at Dartmoor prison, but its publication and the response to it follow a familiar and almost choreographed pattern. Highly critical reports are followed by feigned concern from senior Prison Service bureaucrats, which is followed by standard denials from the Prison Officers Association, which is followed by nothing changing.
Two questions are immediately raised by the Dartmoor report: the role of the prison senior medical officer in allowing disturbed and suicidal prisoners to be caged like animals, and the responsibility of the prison governor for allowing such an inhumane practice to prevail. The governor’s claim that he had instructed that the cage be permanently removed long before the inspector’s visit, yet had been ignored by his staff, raises an even more fundamental question about who was running Dartmoor and who had the final say in how prisoners were treated. It was obviously a question that didn’t particularly perturb the governor who, prior to the publication of the report, hadn’t felt compelled to inform Prison Service headquarters about a crisis of management.
The reality is, of course, that everyone at Dartmoor was aware of what prisoners were being subjected to, and no-one spoke out or went against the grain. There are obvious parallels here with Wormwood Scrubs, where prisoners were routinely beaten in the segregation unit, and all levels of staff conspired and colluded to keep the lid on it. Dartmoor has always been designated as a punishment prison for ‘difficult’ and ‘awkward’ prisoners, as well as for a disproportionate number of black prisoners. It is a stick wielded by the prison system and everyone at Dartmoor knows what is expected of them. The prison has a long established culture of brutality, which is so prevalent that officers didn’t even bother hiding it from the inspectors: ‘This attitude on the part of some staff continued throughout the week with prisoners being variously described to us as the “shit” or “rubbish” of the prison system, or as “these people” or “coloureds” …Prisoners were told that this was “the end of the line”.’
Whenever it is confronted with such unambiguous, unequivocal evidence of a denial of human rights in prisons like Dartmoor and the Scrubs, the Prison Service inevitably attempts to push the blame onto a small minority of ‘rogue officers’, who operate clandestinely. The truth is that where such a minority does operate, it does so in the confident knowledge that it has the tacit support of the system which will never blow the whistle on them. In a gaol such as Dartmoor, all levels of staff collude in the brutalisation of prisoners, and in a wider political climate of retribution and revenge, all feel confident that the backing emanates from the very top.
Dartmoor was built by and housed French prisoners of war from the Napoleonic War in 1809. It was first used as a civilian prison in 1851. In 1959 a government White Paper declared that it was near the ‘end of its serviceable life’, and when Albany prison on the Isle of Wight was commissioned in 1961, it was intended as a replacement, however Dartmoor remained open. In 1979 the May Committee again recommended closure, describing the isolated, insanitary, cold buildings as ‘nowadays simply against nature’.
Following the wave of revolt which swept through British prisons in 1990, the Woolf Report said that Dartmoor should be given a ‘last chance’. A year later a Chief Inspector’s report called Dartmoor a ‘dustbin’, but again said that it should be given a ‘final chance’. As that report was issued, police were investigating a racket whereby desperate prisoners were paying £250 to prison officers to arrange transfers to other prisons.
In 1991 the Prison Reform Trust, usually known for the mildness of its criticisms, called for Dartmoor to be closed: ‘It is isolated and run-down and for 200 years has been dominated by a culture of barbarity and punishment. That culture is all-pervasive and repeated attempts to change it have produced nothing but failure’.
It is now 2001, and the new Chief Inspector, Anne Owers, does not even enter the ‘final chance’ territory. Instead, her conclusion is even more pathetic: ‘Dartmoor needs to find
a positive role supported by a new culture…It needs to be part of a regional and national strategy for the dignified and decent treatment and resettlement of prisoners’. What makes her think that after two centuries as the punishment block for the prison system and copious reports into its failings, last chances, final chances, recategorisations and reclassifications, Dartmoor and the staff who run it will change now?
In the final analysis there is no liberal reformist solution to the existence of brutality and maltreatment in prisons, no piecemeal way of changing something that is so intrinsic to the system. The bottom line is that prisoners only ever achieve a significant improvement in treatment and conditions when they themselves organise and fight for it.
Instead of meaningless debates about how prisons might be made ‘better’ and thereby more legitimate, the focus should instead be on how prisoners can be supported and empowered in their struggle for human rights. There is no middle ground in the struggle for prisoners’ rights: either we campaign and fight for the complete abolition of prisons as instruments of state terror and social control, or we accept their existence and the power of the state to dehumanise a certain section of the working class population.
John Bowden, HMP Bristol
FRFI 166 April / May 2002
