Mick Clifford: Putting a light on the murky side of our prisons
As Ireland was opening up and taking its place in the most developed countries in the world, Mountjoy, its main prison, still had the infrastructure and many of the practices that were half a century out of date.
Prison means different things to different people. For many it’s the place to store away the bad in society. Others, particularly the victims of crime, see it as an appropriate and necessary depository of justice. And then there is probably the majority who simply look away and don’t think twice about what goes on behind the high walls.
“The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote. It’s hard to argue with that. Go to the countries where prisons are literal hellholes and out in mainstream society you will see a complete absence of social solidarity and a contempt among the wealthy for the majority poor. Nowhere, for instance, is this more obvious than in the United States, a country that is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners. And the conditions in some of the prisons are little above the status of jungle in what is supposed to be one of the most advanced societies in the world.
Thankfully, things in Irish prisons are not as bad, but at the same time they’re nothing to write home about. Over the last year, I have had the privilege to work on a book with a man who served as a prison officer for over three decades in Irish Prisons. David McDonald had a varied, and by his own account, fulfilling career, and, as they say in the best movies, he saw plenty.
The evolution of prison life — for both those who work in the institutions and the incarcerated — since the early days of David’s career reflects to some extent the changes that occurred in wider Irish society.
He began in Mountjoy in the late 1980s in what was an exercise in time travel back to the 1940s. As Ireland was opening up and taking its place in the most developed countries in the world, its main prison still had the infrastructure and many of the practices that were half a century out of date.
He gives a harrowing account of the conditions in which AIDS-infected prisoners were kept. This was a time when the virus was, due to its transmissibility, prevalent predominantly in sub groups like the gay community and drug users. Mountjoy had its fair share of addicts for whom crime had become a means to feed addictions. Like in the wider community, AIDS patients were treated like Biblical lepers. In the ‘Joy they were confined to the basement.
"For those who weren’t on short sentences their final months until eventual transfer to hospital or hospice were to be spent in here, removed from family and friends, removed from the general prison population, living with the rodents.”
Another category of prisoner with whom David worked was the subversives as they were known, members of the IRA and other groups serving sentences connected to political violence. In Portlaoise, they were allowed to run their own affairs, separate from the general prison population. They didn’t work and they only communicated with the authorities through their own commanding officers. Discipline was also handed over to the subversives themselves rather than controlled by the prison authorities.
"But it was their own leader who decided on the punishment, not the staff.”
The special arrangements extended to matters like compassionate leave. And if a prisoner didn’t return as scheduled, it would be the IRA who would retrieve him and deliver him to the gates of Portlaoise, sometimes in the boot of a car. They all knew that if one man took advantage of the special privileges then they would be withdrawn from all.
David’s account of the regime is fascinating as it contrasts with how subversives were held in the North, where intransigence and confrontation led to hunger strikes and ultimately gifted the Provos with a devastating political tool.
Later his career took him into the newly established Operational Support Group (OSG), set up to stop the flow of contraband into the state’s prisons. His account of the myriad ways that prisoners will attempt — and usually succeed — to bring drugs into prisons is jaw-dropping. This included one ruse that involved a man casting a fishing line over the prison walls in the dead of night to hook up with his associates on the inside who were able to establish a type of trolley system to bring in drugs, phones, and even a quantity of meat.
What emerges from the various accounts is the creativity that can be deployed by some prisoners in order to either feed a habit or, as is often the case, deal drugs inside. Not for the first time in parsing David’s career, it occurred to me that there are people in prison who if born in different circumstances, or different city postcodes, could well be at the helm of big organisations, enjoying high-flying careers and possibly even running the country.
The world outside is also reflected in prison through the operation of criminal gangs. The names that are well-known often continue to maintain their crime empires, to a large extent, after they are sentenced. And, of course, the mode of power in this respect is the mobile phone. Just as with drugs, the ingenious methods of smuggling in phones — and keeping them beyond the reach of the authorities inside — is fascinating.
Creativity is not confined to prisoners. The OSG got involved in surveillance to detect not only the flow of contraband but whether any prison officers were turning a buck in the employ of gang leaders. Some of this was illegal and when David McDonald blew the whistle on it in 2019, the Minister for Justice ordered an inquiry. That found that it was the work of a few officers, but major questions still remain as to how far up the chain of authority the surveillance was known about and even sanctioned. What the inquiry did find was that the operation was funded from Irish Prison Service coffers.
So it goes behind the high walls. Most people as stated at the outset don’t care about what goes on in Irish prisons, at least not unless and until it impacts directly on their lives. Neither do they care that prisons are, as one prison chaplain reported last year, “a dumping ground for mental illness”. The apathy is reflected in official circles, where the attitude in general to prisons is the less seen or heard, the better. The body politic know that there are no votes in prisons, unlike, for instance, there is in policy towards the gardaí or other elements of the public service. Hopefully, David McDonald’s account may open up some debate on this area of public life that has always been shoved into a quiet, dark corner.
Unlocked – An Irish Prison Officer’s Story by David McDonald with Mick Clifford.
