Mountjoy prison, by its very nature, is an inhospitable place. The same could not be said of those who run it. The Governor, John Lonergan, and the Chief Officer, Jim Petherbridge, and their staff could not have been more helpful to their new Church of Ireland chaplain as he came to terms with what must be one of the strangest environments in which clergy work. The Chief Officer brought me on a tour of the prison and introduced me to people in charge – the Medical Unit, the Separation Unit, St Patrick’s for young offenders and the Female Prison.
It took me months to get the hang of things and to work out a routine. People are not always where you expect to find them in a prison so a routine is always provisional. Mr Duffy, an assistant governor, was the one I went to most often when I needed to know the lie of the land. I learned most about prisoners from review boards, chaired by an official from the prisons’ section of the Department of Justice. The board consisted of an assistant governor, a senior officer, a social worker and chaplain all who had daily dealings with the prisoner under review. Each was encouraged to have their say on whether the prisoner in question should be granted whatever leave or concession he had applied for. I heard the experienced professionals assessing and evaluating and making carefully considered recommendations to the official from the Department. The whole process was conducted thoroughly and gave me great insights into the treatment of prisoners. It also gave me confidence in the fairness of the system.
I visited the prison two days a week. My Catholic chaplain colleagues spent five or six days a week, nine o’clock to five and often much more, in the oppressive atmosphere helping prisoners through problem after problem, especially crises concerning wives and children at home. They were always ready to help and support their neophyte Church of Ireland part-time colleague. Like my friends in hospital chaplaincy they were a fine group of people, priests and nuns, committed to serve the prisoners without judgment and without fear or favour, and they did all with a sense of humour that lightened the load.
Occasionally Catholic prisoners asked to attend the Church of Ireland chapel on a Sunday morning, usually out of curiosity, or for the opportunity to meet female prisoners since there was a separate Mass for Catholic females. At first I used to let one of the Catholic chaplains know. Soon one of them told me there was no need to mention it since if they didn’t go to the Church of Ireland service they probably wouldn’t go to Mass anyway. One Church of Ireland prisoner went every Sunday to Mass because, fancying himself as a singer, he had the opportunity to sing for an audience. At one Good Friday service while I was reading the long gospel account of the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus I noticed one of the prisoners looking and listening intently. He was mesmerised. I could see that he was no longer in that prison chapel, but in the garden at the arrest, in the praetorium at the trial and on the Hill of Calvary at the crucifixion. It was probably the first time that he had heard the story in sequence or perhaps at all. I was sorry when he was not in chapel on Easter Sunday to hear the dénouement.
The prisoners I felt particularly sorry for were the young men and women, drug couriers arrested while bringing drugs into the country. Many of them didn’t use drugs themselves but were seduced by substantial sums of money into transporting them for dealers who couldn’t care less when they were caught. There were young people in for other crimes most of whom came from socially deprived families or from broken homes. The only person in touch with one young prisoner was one of his grandmothers, who knew what appalling things he had had to endure as a child and was determined, despite all, to support him as best she could. One young gay man was serving a sentence for an assault as he tried to protect himself from the sexual advances on an older man. He was a remarkably sensitive and good-humoured person who found prison difficult, but coped with great good humour and courage.
My first meeting with one young prisoner convinced me that he was deeply depressed and I feared he might be suicidal. I told this to a chief officer who arranged immediately to have him put into a strip-cell ostensibly for his own safety. I felt really badly about this. In a strip-cell a prisoner wears only his underpants and in the cell there is only a mattress on the floor and a blanket of such material the prisoner could not use it to harm himself. He would have to stay there until a psychiatrist could see him and that could be in two, three or maybe four days time. This is a barbaric and uncivilised thing for the State to do to a sick man. This was not the fault of the prison staff but of the Department of Justice and ultimately the Government who provided woefully inadequate psychiatric services to the prison. Politicians in power, largely speaking, don’t care about people, especially prisoners. They care about power and where the votes will come from to keep them where they are. The old tag is true; ‘there are no votes in prison reform.’
The main concern of the prison understandably was for security and containment. There was negligible rehabilitation or therapy. Considering the size of the drug problem amongst prisoners, drug rehabilitation programmes barely scratched the surface. The Quakers run an excellent voluntary programme in the prison at week-ends. This is the Alternative to Violence Programme, run on group learning principles where prisoners after a certain stage can themselves become members of the training team. I recommended to a number of prisoners that they should take the programme. When I asked one prisoner what he learned at the week-end at one of these courses he said with amazement. ‘I learned that there are ways to get children to do what you want without hitting them.’
The whole of humanity and the whole of society are represented in prison, but not in fair proportions. The prison population is heavily weighted in the direction of young men in their teens and twenties from socially deprived areas of cities. There are people in prison that should still be there into old age and never freed; people who have committed the most appalling crimes and are likely to re-offend. There are people in prison who should never be there in the first place; people who have defaulted on fines and who have committed petty crimes, not against the person, and there are people in prison who have committed crimes in the whole range between these two extremes.
Who could live in Ireland these days and not believe that there are people who should serve long sentences who will never end up in prison? Businessmen, politicians and other wealthy tax criminals. There is undoubtedly one law for the rich and another for the poor. A prisoner once held a newspaper up to me with a headline about the financial affairs of a senior politician and asked me what he himself was doing in prison for £150 cheque fraud when the politician was outside living in luxury. I told him I agreed with him entirely. Most politicians have no motivation when it comes to the need to correct this imbalance and perhaps some of them are afraid that if they change things they themselves or their colleagues may end up on the wrong side of the law. In my view politicians should not have ultimate control of the penal justice system. Some way should be devised whereby an impartial group of human beings who understand the issues of people and power should have the say in controlling justice and in determining penalties. Central to this would be the removal of the imbalance between rich man’s crime and poor man’s crime and to give a greater emphasis to rehabilitation than to retribution. Some chance.
I never met a prisoner who claimed to be innocent of the crime for which he was in prison. Neither did I ever meet a prisoner that believed his sentence was too lenient, but I did encounter a number who believed their sentences were too harsh. One middle-aged man was sentenced to three years for possession of cannabis. He smoked a joint or two on Friday nights with some friends. His appeal against severity of sentence came up for hearing having spent about a year in prison. It succeeded and he was released from the appeal court, showing how well, at least on this occasion, the appeal system works.
In my experience the prison regime at Mountjoy was fair and humane. The example was set by the Governor and seemed to me to permeate to most officers in their dealings with prisoners. There were some exceptional incidents, but they were exceptional. When things were running normally officers and prisoners interacted easily, but if prisoners cut up rough, officers were capable of cutting up rough too and they were well-trained and able to deal with difficult situations.
Of course there is pain and tragedy in any prison. What it is like to be a prisoner I do not know, I can hardly imagine, but the atmosphere in the small female prison at Mountjoy was particularly relaxed. One hot summer day I found a female prisoner I wanted to see out in the exercise yard playing netball. We spoke for a while and as I was leaving, Eamon, one of my chaplain colleagues called me from the far end of the yard where he was surrounded by a small group of prisoners.
‘Pat, what would you say to these ladies, they’re calling me a paedophile?’ Eamon was taking it all in good part, and before I had time to say anything one of the women shot the question at me:
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m the Church of Ireland chaplain.’
‘A Protestant,’ she said in mock horror and stood back a few paces, put up her fists and started to shadow box me. Suddenly she aimed a real punch at my crotch. Fortunately she missed, but Eamon was covered with embarrassment, and I never answered his question. On my way down the yard I passed two young women:
‘Howya Father?’
‘How are things girls? And like a shot out of a gun one of them came back:
‘Nothing a big black pint wouldn’t cure, Father.’ Humour in prison is a contribution towards survival.