Hidden Ireland’s latest refuge — the prison system

A MAN is beaten to death while in the ‘care of the State’. And we learn from media reports that our prison system is a hotbed of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

Now where we have heard those words before? Answer: in heart-rending reports of abuse in orphanages and ‘correctional’ institutions in what has come to be known as the Hidden Ireland.

And in media references to the thousands of cases that have come before the Residential Institutions Redress Board.

But hasn’t the Hidden Ireland been consigned to the dark and shameful pages of our past, giving way to a new openness and transparency about the way the State treats people entrusted to its care?

Has there not been a strong public and political sense of ‘never again’ in response to revelations of past wrongs in institutions? Yet it is happening again, right now in 2006, to people ‘under the State’s protection’. The supposed purpose of prison is to punish by depriving a convicted person of freedom for a specified period of time, and also to achieve a measure of reform and rehabilitation of the prisoner.

A judge doesn’t send you ‘inside’ to be terrorised on a daily basis, to have your life put in danger, to be sexually, physically or emotionally abused, or indeed to have one’s health endangered by being subjected to filthy and unhygienic conditions.

There is a temptation to forget about people who have been sentenced to a prison term. The notion that they ‘get what they deserve’ is quite prevalent among normal and respectable citizens who never get sent to prison.

Such sentiments are understandable in the cases of offenders who have committed horrific crimes like murder, vicious assaults, aggravated burglary or rape. But we need to remember at all times that each person who is led away in handcuffs to serve a custodial sentence is some mother’s son or daughter, a flesh-and-blood human being.

Like the man who was savagely murdered in the presence of other inmates in Mountjoy. The State failed to protect him as it was obliged to... just as it failed other prisoners who took their lives in prison or were killed by fellow inmates, or were horribly abused while in the care of the State.

It is relatively easy for the State to condemn the wrongs of another era, but not so easy for it to own up to this present-day betrayal of people under its supposed protection.

Until the harrowing issues affecting the prison system are addressed effectively, I suggest we stop referring to people released from prison as ‘convicts’ or ‘ex-prisoners’.

Let’s call them what they really are... survivors of institutional abuse.

John Fitzgerald

Lr Coyne Street

Callan

Co Kilkenny