An interview with Mr Peter Dawson

The Sir Leon Radzinowicz Visiting Fellowship for 2023 - 2025 has been granted to Mr Peter Dawson.

The Institute of Criminology grants this position to people who have made a lasting impact in government, the judiciary, parliament, or other public offices. Peter Dawson has worked in and around prisons, in a variety of capacities, for over three decades. He has sought  to promote reform both from within and without the system.

Working in prisons was not Peter’s original choice of career. When he joined the Home Office shortly after graduating, it was one job out of several to which he was assigned. However, he found himself taking a liking to prisons and the people he met.

His first job, in the then Prison Department at the Home Office, coincided with the Strangeways riot in 1990. This occurred when prisoners at Manchester and a number of other prisons rioted in protest at poor living conditions. The subsequent inquiry and report by Harry Woolf set out a blueprint for reform, which Peter describes as cementing his interest in working in the prison system.

After nearly two decades in the Home Office, culminating in a position on the Prisons Board, Peter joined a scheme to transfer from administrative to operational duties. This started with a spell as a prison officer at HMP Brixton, eventually returning as its deputy governor four years later. He subsequently became governor of HMP Downview and HMP Highdown. After a couple of years in the private sector, in 2015 Peter joined the Prison Reform Trust (PRT), and was made its Director a year later.

It was, in his words, “an opportunity to say in public all the things that I was only ever able to say in private”.

Under his leadership, PRT focused heavily on seeking to give prisoners an influence over the policy making process. Peter has been an outspoken advocate for reform to the parole system and the sentencing of serious crime in particular.

Many of the issues with the prison system highlighted in the Woolf Report remain with us. The demand for prison places still exceeds supply. While new prisons have been built and some old ones closed, the system remains overcrowded. It has gone from 40,000 prisoners at the time of the riot to 90,000 prisoners today. Although the number of people being sent to prison for short periods has fallen, governments of all colours have ratcheted up sentence lengths. This has been in response to notorious cases and in attempts to out-manoeuvre their political opponents.

Though the fundamental problems remain, Peter’s assessment of the impact of reformers’ efforts is not entirely bleak. There have been significant changes that have made a practical difference to prisoners and their loved ones. When he first worked in the prison service, prisons lacked telephones. Now families can communicate legitimately by phone, email and video-call. Prison healthcare was notoriously poor.  Now it is inspected to the same standards as healthcare in the community, and the NHS is responsible for its commissioning.

Peter has always enjoyed the variety of people he has met in prisons, both those who live there and those who work or volunteer there. It is unsurprising, then, that one of his priorities for change is breaking down the barriers between prisons and the communities they serve. It is not easy when the prison estate is so poorly suited to achieving that – the product of accident and necessity rather than design. Many prisons are on the sites of Second World War RAF bases, and some date back to the Napoleonic Wars. Being so far away from centres of population is the worst starting point for a prison that wants to keep its inmates connected with the communities to which they will return.

As a Radzinowicz Fellow, Peter has worked with students studying at the Institute of Criminology. He has enjoyed hearing the perspectives of people from different countries and different backgrounds.

“It’s felt like a real challenge”, he explains. “There’s a risk in the work that I’ve done that you spend too much time talking to people who think much the same as you do. But here people say, ‘well, I'm not sure I do agree with that’, or ‘that might work in England and Wales, but it doesn't fit in Colombia, where I come from’. Or it doesn't make sense in India. Or it doesn't make sense if you're a police officer. So that’s been really stimulating”.

This fellowship also involved chairing a session of the annual Radzinowicz Symposium. For Peter, this was another source of insight, revealing how different people view crime and criminality.

“It brought together those with a theoretical interest in punishment, with those with what you might call a more anthropological interest in it. The theoretical side might ask ‘What is punishment? What's it for? Why is it something that most societies have? How can you justify it?’” “The anthropological side is more about observing how punishment operates, its impact on those who inflict it and those who suffer it. I suppose the anthropological side for most people inevitably leads to a disquiet about it. You see some extreme suffering, and you see abuse. You’re quite likely to finish up on the ‘why do we do this at all?’ or at least ‘do we do it too much?’ side of the debate. So it’s healthy to be asked some first principle theoretical questions before assuming that the path to reform is obvious”.

The symposium brought together people with direct experience of the prison system, like himself, and people with less “hands on” experience but who nonetheless think deeply about the subject. Overall, his first Radzinowicz symposium left a positive impression, seeing people with different perspectives learn from each other. He would say that’s a characteristic of a healthy prison too.

As the second year of his fellowship commences, prompted by years of conversations with prisoners, he is interested in questions about finding purpose in prisons. He also wants to re-evaluate the role of prison officers, who do a complex, morally charged job but are still viewed as relatively unskilled workers.

Peter Dawson is greatly appreciative of the position that being a Radzinowicz Fellow has offered him and has enjoyed every moment of it. He is particularly grateful to have been granted it as somebody without a background in research.

“I do think particularly with prisons, but with all the criminal justice work, there is a profound moral element to it,” he says, “so you want people to have the opportunity for deep thinking. The Institute offers a precious space to do that.”

He hopes there may be opportunities for the Institute to continue its already impressive tradition of making a practical difference to penal policy.

“An invitation to Cambridge can make you feel clever and important. There are risks in that, of course, but if you want to influence people who are in a position to make change happen, it’s a really significant asset.”

September 2024