Prison security - We’ve lost the plot

THERE is something rotten in our prison service. This week mobile phone pictures were published of murderer Charlotte Mulhall — one of the infamous Scissors Sisters — jokingly holding a carving knife to the throat of drug offender Denis Gibney in Mountjoy.

This raises all sorts of issues and is the kind of thing that suggests our prisons are not the sort of deterrent we would like them to. Charlotte Mulhall was convicted of murdering her mother’s lover with a kitchen knife. The courts found that she beheaded Fareh Swaleh Noor.

The publication suggests that the crackdown on mobile phones in our prisons is a sad joke. That Mulhall should have access to the very weapon which she used to murder Noor makes a mockery of the notion of proper supervision.

Every prisoner is entitled to an opportunity at building a new life, but every citizen should be able to expect that our prisons are effective, disciplined places of reform and detention.

Budgies, prisoners calling live radio programmes, a plentiful supply of drugs, plasma screens and murderers brandishing carving knives suggest that we have lost the plot.