Mick Clifford: Putting a light on the murky side of our prisons

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, writes Mick Clifford

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the world, Mountjoy, its main prison, still had the infrastructure and many of the practices that were half a century out of date.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.