Alyson Brown's new book provides an in-depth, multi-perspective analysis of the largest prison disturbance in Britain between the riot at Chatham in 1861 and that at Strangeways (Manchester) in 1990. The trouble was said to have begun on Friday, 22 January 1932, when one reputedly dangerous prisoner, Thomas Davis, attacked a veteran prison officer with a stick that had a razor blade embedded in it. The outbreak proper occurred the following Sunday morning, when about forty prisoners on morning parade broke ranks and, with the aid of about a hundred others, caused extensive damage, primarily to the central offices of the prison. Despite Dartmoor's imposing physical isolation, order was restored within about ninety minutes, largely with the aid of the Plymouth police—who had in fact been alerted the day before by the already nervous prison governor, Stanley Norton Roberts. Of the thirty-one inmates who were subsequently tried at a special assizes, Davis drew the longest sentence: twelve years, added on to an original sentence of ten (of which he had served only fourteen months at the time of the uprising). Twenty-two others drew added sentences ranging from six months to ten years. Although they were subsequently transferred to a range of other prisons in order to minimize the risk of further disturbances, many were inevitably returned to Dartmoor within a few months because, alongside Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, it remained one of only two institutions deemed both secure and remote enough to house England's worst classes of offenders, those sentenced to long-term sentences of “penal servitude.”

Carefully qualified language as to most of the purported facts of the riot is necessary because, as Brown so vividly and effectively demonstrates, the immediate aftermath of the uprising produced a great deal of retrospective and selective characterization, all of which served the institutional self-interest of the most vulnerable parties involved: government, the Prison Commission, and the national press. The events at Dartmoor took place during an era of self-consciously reformist attitudes in the administration of English prisons: an era in which officials placed a greater emphasis on the reformative objectives of confinement than its retributive dimensions. It was embarrassing, and certainly counterintuitive, that such an event occurred in a prison that contained less than half the number it had originally been built to house and during an era in which many believed that the rigors of the classical Victorian prison regime were being extensively (and dangerously) diminished. Moreover, in light of the apparent lack of resolve among most of the Dartmoor staff, from the governor downwards, it became vitally necessary that the principal blame for the event be placed upon a hard core of irreclaimable offenders, rather than leaving a pathway open for unwelcome scrutiny of deficiencies in either the staffing of English prisons or their underlying administrative philosophy.

In this official mission, the national press proved an obliging ally, providing dramatic aerial photographs of the burning prison, highlighting the leading role of inmates who were said to be among the most prominent members of “motor bandit” and “smash-and-grab” gangs, and even speculating that those inmates had acted in concert with fellow gang members on the outside as part of a more general prison break which had, mercifully, been thwarted by timely action on the part of prison officials within and police officers without. In government circles, although some attention was given to a lack of resolve among some members of the staff (especially the unfortunate Roberts), a central narrative of gang-focused inmate leaders provided a welcome diversion from closer and more sustained public scrutiny of a system which was then (as always) under stress. The subsequent criminal trials essentially recapitulated that story, as had the earlier internal inquiry conducted during the week following the riot. That inquiry was chaired by a sympathetic local QC (Herbert Du Parcq) and substantively directed by the official most closely associated with the prevailing reformist ideology of the inter-war era, Alexander Paterson. The deficiencies of the Du Parcq inquiry, in terms of both a preposterously short time gathering evidence (only five days) and its evident biases, are powerfully contrasted with the far more searching five-month inquiry conducted in the wake of the Strangeways Riot of 1990. In an era of profound economic constraint and potentially frail liberal sympathies, government was deeply relieved to be able to lay most of the blame squarely upon members of the inter-war “criminal class.”

There is a lot to admire about this book. It is unusually interesting and readable for an academic monograph, and its thematic organization is very effectively realized. The last substantive chapter, promising a microhistory of the riot, could perhaps have been omitted. Even though it is markedly shorter than the other chapters, more than half its length is largely given over to theorizing microhistories rather than providing one. In this respect, Brown might have done better to follow her role model, V. A. C. Gatrell, in his insistence that historians should “assert a creative independence of academic ratiocinations.” And, as Brown herself candidly admits, the richly detailed account that she has already provided in previous chapters could easily be called a “microhistory” (130). On a more technical note, the book's two-and-a-half page index is highly inadequate. No ready reference is provided to the exact place in the text in which either Christian names or specific dates are given, a major weakness in a book whose organization is so repetitive and recapitulative in character. Most frustratingly, there is no entry relating to the trial of the designated ringleaders of the riot, an event of central importance which is repeatedly returned to over the course of the book, even though the index separately references past prison reports which are noted only in passing.

In all important respects, however, this book is a great success. It provides a complex and multifaceted account of a key moment in twentieth-century British penal history, a subject on which we still have few sustained scholarly works, and it does so in blessedly jargon-free language. In conjunction with her first book, English Society and the Prison (2003), it cements Alyson Brown's status as our premier historian of the modern English prison.