Women Locked Up: New documentary shows life in Ireland's largest prison for females
Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas is a three-part series on Virgin Media One.
“You get three hots and a cot. That’s the old saying,” says a woman in the documentary series Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas, referring to the regular meals and a bed afforded to women in the Dóchas Centre, Ireland’s largest all-female prison. “You come in, you get well. It’s insanity – you do it all over again. That’s the power of addiction, doing the same thing over and over again, and getting the same results.”
The woman in prison, whose name is withheld, was without a mother from the age of four, she tells the Virgin Media One series. She spent her childhood moving around care homes. She started using heroin at 13 years of age, becoming part of a gang of about 15 homeless kids who roamed Dublin’s city streets. Most of them are dead now. She entered treatment aged 16, and worked as a care attendant in Dublin’s St James’s Hospital for about a decade, but picked up drugs again in her twenties owing to post-natal depression. She first entered prison aged 40.
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