The Prison That Time Forgot

Of course, a notorious prison would not be complete without some notorious inmates, and Dartmoor is no exception. Infamous alumni of Dartmoor Prison include John Haigh (the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’), Frank Mitchell (known nationwide as ‘The Mad Axeman’ and who escaped, with the help of the equally notorious London gangsters the Kray Twins in 1966) and the now-legendary London gangster ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser (who spent no less than forty two years in various prisons and psychiatric hospitals for various crimes of violence, and was certified insane on no less than two seperate occasions). Slightly more distinguished inmates include the Irish revolutionary Michael Davitt and Eamon De Valera, De Valera was later to become the President of the Irish Republic aster Irish independence had been secured.

As a civilian prison, Dartmoor can be considered the equal of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island, ensuring its place among the most notorious prisons in the world. Like Alcatraz, Dartmoor was always intended as a punishment prison. It was designed to hold, and break, the worst convicts Britain had to offer and to provide a dumping ground where other prisons could send inmates that they couldn’t handle. The theory behind Dartmoor was simple. Take the worst inmates possible, hold them as far from civilisation as possible, and keep them under as harsh a regime as possible. In short, out of sight and out of mind. In the same way that all prisons have a punishment block for unruly or disobedient inmates, Dartmoor was the punishment prison for the entire British penal system. Even today, when Dartmoor is much improved, the transfer or threat of transfer there is still used by guards in more lenient prisons as a means of cowing unruly inmates into obedience and submission.

Dartmoor today is, depending on your attitude toward criminals, a shadow of what it once was, greatly improved on what it once was, or the dinosaur of the British penal system that should have been permanently closed many years ago. Whereas it was once a ‘Category A’ prison dealing with the nation’s toughest and most intractable inmates, today it has been downgraded to a ‘Category C’ prison for inmates who pose a low rsik, but are still not trusted enough to be sent to a ‘Category D’ or ‘open’ prison. It is also used as a training prison for new prison officers to get their early experience of prison and prisoners before moving on to tougher prisons such as Whitemoor, Wakefield, Parkhurst and others. Both the disciplinary regime and the inmates living conditions have improved immeasurably from Dartmoor’s early days, but ‘Her Majesty’s Prison, Dartmoor’ was still referred to, only a few years ago, by Judge Stephen Tumin (former Chief Inspector of Prisons) as ‘An offence against Nature’ and by current Inspector of Prisons Anne Owens as ‘The prison that time forgot.’