Dartmoor Dialogues: An exploration of HMP Dartmoor’s Journey Towards Becoming an Integrated Prison Underpinned by Restorative Practices

Recent research and prison inspections have argued that prisons in England and Wales are in a state of crisis with repeated accounts of overcrowding, rising levels of violence and selfharm, and concerns about safety, substance misuse, deteriorating physical conditions and poor-quality resettlement provision. This has been during an era of significant cuts in prison budgets and staffing levels (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2019; House of Commons Justice Committee [HCJC], 2019a and b; Prison Reform Trust, 2019). Amidst this crisis the HCJC (2019a) has called for a prison policy that aims to reform and to rehabilitate offenders as well as punish. In early 2017 academics from the School of Law, Criminology and Government at the University of Plymouth were invited by the Governor of HMP Dartmoor to research how the rehabilitation environment in the prison could be strengthened. In 2015 HMP Dartmoor established itself as an integrated prison. This set in place a series of changes described by the Governor as the ‘Dartmoor Journey’. Since 2017, as part of these changes, the ‘Dialogue Road Map’ (DRM) model of conflict resolution and non-violent communication has been progressively introduced. This involved training prisoners and prison officers as facilitators to support non-violent conflict resolution. Ultimately, the DRM project at Dartmoor seeks to build a whole-prison approach which improves mental health with fewer incidents of self-harm and suicide and leads to less violence and safer custody in prison. The achievement of such goals is expected to create an ‘enabling environment’ in the prison for rehabilitation to flourish and so reduce rates of reoffending. The DRM model has so far been implemented in two wings of the prison.