The Amazing Mutiny At the Dartmoor Convict Prison

Abstract

At around 9.20–9.30 on the morning of Sunday 24 January 1932 in Dartmoor Prison in Devon, around 40 convicts broke from their ranks in the exercise yards. They ran around parade grounds accumulating others until an estimated 150 or more inmates were out of control of prison officers. The prisoners seized effective control of the prison for about an hour and a half. During this time, extensive damage was done and fires were started which targeted the central offices and personal and official records. For a short period, the riot overturned mechanisms of discipline centred on the distinct organization of space, a strict regulation of activity and time, and upon classification and surveillance. Reinforcements from Plymouth police were needed to re-establish control and armed force was used when they, with prison officers, retook the prison. There has been little academic interest in this major event in the history of English prisons despite the considerable pressure it placed on prison authorities and the Home Office. Both Pathe News and Movietone screened reports in cinemas across the country. Indeed, Superintendent Walter Hambrook (1937: 245) noted that they provided a ‘vivid impression of the magnitude and gravity of this startling event’ on the day before he was instructed to undertake the CID inquiry into the disturbance. In the aftermath of the riot, questions were raised in Parliament about prison conditions and the course of contemporary penal policy. Lack of research into this dramatic incident highlights not only the scant work done on the history of prison riots but also the fact that, as Clive Emsley (1996: 78) has stated, the ‘whole field’ of penal policy in the twentieth century remains ‘largely unexplored’ by historians. This is especially true of the inter-war period. In this context, analysis of the major riot, or as it was then termed ‘mutiny’, which occurred in Dartmoor Convict Prison in 1932 has much to offer historians and criminologists with regard to analysis of penal reform, prison discipline and the internal social dynamics of the prison. Because large-scale prison riots have been uncommon in English history, they have attracted considerable media attention and there is more evidence on these flashpoints and the contexts in which they occur than for other kinds of disorder. As Sykes (1958: 53) pointed out in his early sociological examination of prison life in 1950s America, power ‘unexercised is seldom as visible as power that is challenged’. But even when unchallenged, the operation of power within the prison maintains what Bottoms (1999: 251) describes as a ‘dynamic social equilibrium’, the precariousness of which can be attested to by historical prison records.

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