Within a few days of becoming Minister for Justice in 1992 Maire Geoghegan-Quinn visited Mountjoy prison. She was appalled by what she saw, especially in that part of the prison which kept women prisoners. She was persuaded that a new women's prison had to be built and preparatory work began almost immediately.
When Maire Geoghegan-Quinn left office in December 1994, another woman, Nora Owen, succeeded her. She too was persuaded of the necessity to press ahead with the new women's prison and, although there was a hiccup during one of the crime hysterias in 1995 and 1996, work on the new prison went ahead and a few months ago the new women's prison was opened.
Those connected with the project are convinced that had there not been two women as Minister for Justice during this time the new prison would not have happened. Previous male Ministers for Justice were uninterested in prison conditions, seeing no votes in improving them and no moral imperative to do so. The present Minister's priorities are more directed towards providing more prison places than towards improving existing conditions, although, apparently, the complete refurbishment of the male section of Mountjoy is about to commence.
The new women's prison is surely a model of what a prison should be: a place where the sole punishment imposed is the restriction of the liberty of the prisoner to leave the prison and which otherwise treats the prisoner with respect. Prisoners are kept in houses all of which look out on to courtyards. Each prisoner has a room of her own with a bathroom ensuite.
Many prisoners have televisions in their rooms. The dining areas are up to high quality canteen standards - certainly far better than the canteen facilities at RTE, for instance. Staff, visitors and prisoners dine in the same area.
In some of the houses, prisoners are free to decide when to go to bed or go to their rooms, they may use communal kitchens at any time, visit each others' rooms, sit around in communal sitting areas.
A new library is being stocked. There are computer rooms and other classrooms. There is a well-equipped gymnasium. There are courses on offer in art, crafts and in a variety of academic subjects, from basic literacy to Open University courses.
On a tour of the prison recently, it was obvious that there was an easy, relaxed relationship between the prison staff and the prisoners. One of the prisoners is due to give birth soon and it is arranged that she may keep the baby with her in prison for up to a year. The new women's prison is a credit to the two women Ministers for Justice, to the present Minister for Justice who did not obstruct what was underway when he came to office and who is now planning to do the same for the men's prison. It is also a credit to officials of the Department of Justice, whom many of us have excoriated down through the years over prison conditions, and to the current prison service, including its chief Sean Alyward. But above all it is a credit to the people in Mountjoy itself, most notably, its enlightened governor, John Lonergan, and the head of the women's prison, Catherine Comerford.
The men's section of Mountjoy, where there are more than 700 prisoners - almost double the number that the jail was built to accommodate - remains a disgrace. Prisoners there talk of lice, mice and cockroaches infesting their cells. There are no in-cell toilet facilities, which requires slopping out every morning (i.e. the emptying of chamber pots). The number of showers is hopelessly inadequate, which means that prisoners are able to wash themselves no more than once a week.
The drug rehabilitative facilities, after years of protests and promises, remain pathetically inadequate. And this has been due in part to the medical service. Only in the last few weeks has the Department of Justice and the Prison Service got around to confronting a problem that has been there for the best part of a decade. For reasons of libel it is not possible to be more explicit about the source of the problem.
There is perhaps an even worse scandal to do with the psychiatric services available to prisoners. The problem is that there are only three places available for prisoners in the Central Mental Hospital, in Dundrum, Co Dublin, and none of the other psychiatric hospitals will take prisoners. This means that prisoners who are in urgent need of inpatient psychiatric care are denied this for months on end and this applies even to prisoners who are certified as insane. The distress this causes to the prisoners concerned is enormous and the danger to them of the denial of care is obvious. And, yet, nothing is done.
In the book under review, Mountjoy: the Story of a Prison by Tim Carey, contemporary conditions in Mountjoy get only a passing mention in an epilogue. Indeed the book's story of the prison ends in 1962 and only 28 of its 232 pages deal with the period after 1922.
NEVERTHELESS, the book has been worthwhile. Prisons or prisoners were not a problem in Ireland from 1718 until the American War of Independence because prisoners were simply transported to America. Thirteen thousand Irish criminals were transported mainly to labour intensive plantations in Maryland and Virginia. Then from 1791 to 1853, 39,000 Irish convicts were deported to Australia (9,000 of these were women). Up to the middle of the 19th century prisons were places where people were kept awaiting charge or deportation or corporal punishment or execution - Tim Carey records that at least 242 people were executed in Dublin (alone) between 1780 and 1895 and he estimates that this would be the equivalent of 1,200 executions nowadays over a 15-year period.
But even when prisons were mere staging posts, conditions were appalling or not too bad depending on one's situation. Tim Carey records how rapes, robberies and murders were committed with impunity. "Some inmates lived in opulent wealth, while others lay chained and naked in dungeons, murderers mixed with petty thieves, men mixed with women, prisoners without medical attention died of disease, days were spent gambling and drinking."
Then towards the end of the 18th century and into the 19th century a reform movement took place, which led eventually to the construction of Mountjoy, "a model prison". It was believed that "the principle causes of crime are to be found in the ignorance and want of education of the lower orders" and that idleness was at the root of all depravity. The plan was to construct a prison which would both rehabilitate and deter - as well as resolving a crisis over the placement of prisoners, since Australia was no longer willing to accept convicts by the middle of the 19th century.
Mountjoy was built to cut off communication between prisoners, kept in 496 single cells. Prisoners were prohibited from talking at any stage during their time there. Even in the prison chapel they were segregated from each other by screens. Some irony, given the congested chaos of the men's prison today.
Over half a million prisoners have been housed in Mountjoy in the 150 years since it opened and the vast majority of these have been poor people. Tim Carey quotes approvingly from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "most crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints, which the necessary but unequal laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possessions or those objects that are coveted by many".
Mountjoy is a story not just of a prison but of how a penal policy has been and is being used as an instrument of social unfairness and of how that penal policy has failed spectacularly to meet the goals it set for itself.
Vincent Browne is a columnist for The Irish Times and a broadcaster with RTE
