I am writing this article as a Trustee of Prison Dialogue, a UK-based not-for-profit charity which seeks to promote the use of Dialogue in the Criminal Justice System, and especially in prisons. My route to arriving in this position was somewhat roundabout, as I am neither a Criminal Justice professional nor a Dialogue Practitioner. I encountered the concept of Dialogue in the course of my career in the oil business with British Petroleum as part of some work we were doing to strengthen team working across different departments and break down organisational silos. During this period I met Peter Garrett and Jane Ball and heard about some of the exciting Dialogue work they were doing in prisons. From a distance – and as a UK taxpayer – it seemed (and seems) to me that, at a purely pragmatic level, if a key part of the role of prison is to reduce the likelihood of those released re-offending again, then British prisons had plenty of scope for improvement.
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