Early Dialogue work in HMP Whitemoor (a high and maximum security prison in England) by Peter Garrett led to the founding of the not-for-profit Charity PRISON DIALOGUE in 1995.
Dialogue Associates has sustained a strong commitment to Prison Dialogue since then, making available our time, thinking and Intellectual Property in support of the Charity and its Associates Members.
We believe there is a blatant need for the social transformation and humanising of the criminal justice system, and we want to make our contribution to that need.
Although we may benefit personally from our commercial work in Dialogue Associates, we want the whole field of Criminal Justice to benefit from Dialogue - and prisons and prisoners in particular, given the unresolved aspects they represent of the social psyche.
Winston Churchill (in a Parliamentary speech in 1910) was eloquent about the relationship between prisons and civilised society…
“The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state and even of convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry of all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it, in the heart of every person – these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”
Click here to visit the Prison Dialogue website and find out more about the work we do.
A time line of Dialogue activity by Prison Dialogue since 1993 in prisons and the community in the UK, the US and Trinidad and Tobago