McDowell's jail plans hit as Mountjoy boss to quit
Mountjoy Prison's John Lonergan says he will not head up the jail when it moves from its central Dublin location to a greenfield site on the outskirts of the capital where it is to meant to become the centrepiece of the prisons network and a model for the operation of all jails.
Disclosure of his plans to quit six years early came as he and Mr McDowell clashed over the minister's plans to drive drugs out of prisons through a series of controversial measures including mandatory drug testing of inmates and an end to physical contact between inmates and families during visits.
The measures will be set out in revised national prison rules to be issued by the minister before the summer but he has already met with prison governors and outlined what he expects of them.
Mr Lonergan insisted the new rules were not his main reason for deciding to quit the service when Mountjoy leaves its present location in three or four years time.
"I am 21 years at Mountjoy and in terms of taking on a new project, I have run out of energy," he said.
But the outspoken advocate of prison reform delivered a crushing vote of no confidence in the minister's policies when he admitted he would have "huge difficulty" presiding over the kind of regime envisaged by Mr McDowell.
Neither the Department of Justice or the Prison Service were aware of Mr Lonergan's intentions when contacted last night but earlier in the weekend he and the minister clashed at a conference where Mr McDowell departed from his speech to say drugs in prison would no longer be tolerated. He said drug-free units within prisons were not sufficient and that all steps must be taken to eradicate the problem.
"It is a catastrophe for our criminal justice system which is failing to stand up to the problem," he said.
"John Lonergan will argue that it would be inhuman to have glass shields in prison visiting rooms, that the contact permitted is one of the humanising aspects of prison. But the converse of that is that the only thing prison authorities can do is retreat into a corner of the prison and say this is a drug-free unit."
Mr Lonergan replied that he had spent his career bowing to the contradictory wishes of successive ministers. "I have participated in events when ministers have arrived to open a unit and declared a prison drug-free to acres of publicity and then another minister comes along and says drug-free units are useless.
"We provide whatever we are told to provide. That's the minister's prerogative but it would be doing a disservice to the public for a minister not to listen to the practitioners," he said.
He said afterwards there was "nothing like adequate consultation" with people at the coalface of the prison system regarding the design of the most recently built prisons, Cloverhill and the Midlands Prison, and he had no reason to believe his views would be sought on a new Mountjoy.
"It's nonsense to talk about drug-free prisons when 70% of the people in Mountjoy come in with a drug addiction and I don't have one drug counsellor working full-time in the prison," he said.
He added that forbidding contact between prisoners and their families was incompatible with rehabilitation objectives. "I absolutely agree with the minister on the aspiration to have drug-free prisons. How you get there is where I disagree," he said.
