Books & Papers
Dialogue Groups in maximum and high security prison HMP Whitemoor, January to April 1994
Peter Garrett
January 1994: the first prison dialogue groups ever run in the UK were meeting weekly inside HMP Whitemoor, a maximum security facility. Peter Garrett and Dave Parsons had built something with no precedent, and this report documents what the second term revealed.
The collaboration between Peter Garrett and Dave Parsons produced what appear to be the first sustained dialogue groups ever facilitated inside a British prison. Running across C and D Wings at HMP Whitemoor — a maximum and high security establishment — the groups met weekly from January to April 1994. This report, submitted to the Group Work Development Committee, covers the second term of that programme, making it an early and rare institutional record of dialogue practice in a custodial setting. As a foundational document in the history of prison dialogue in the UK, it marks the point at which a practice developed in organisational and community settings was tested against one of the most constrained and adversarial environments imaginable.