Degradation in a women's prison

FIVE years ago, Alan Roberts was teaching philosophy to women prisoners in Dublin's Mountjoy prison when he began to write a novel. Inspired by the tragedy he saw around him, a fictitious character named Mags emerged with a story so harrowing that many readers may find themselves unable to stomach it, while others may be titillated. Sensational as it is, Roberts insists that his novel about the reality of life in Mountjoy prison has actually been "sanitised" in places.

As we meet her, Mags, a naive 17 year old who has never used drugs, has stolen £200 worth of clothes for her new baby and is being sentenced to six months. Her daughter, who she has never let out of her sight since the baby's birth, is torn from her and Mags is indoctrinated into the ways of Mountjoy women's prison, known among the male prisoners as the "rasherhouse", "rasher" being a euphemism for sexual intercourse.

We see her crossing the women's exercise yard, which is overlooked by male prisoners' cells, forcing the women to run a gauntlet of verbal sexual abuse

"the profanities flying through the air, the declarations of hate inter mixed with professions of love and lust - courteous words of seduction, blended with nauseating expressions of debauchery".

Absent mindedly thinking of her child whom she longs for, Mags bumps into a "sear throated" teenage girl, so pale that she is green. The girl is standing facing the windows with her tracksuit bottoms and knickers down around her ankles.

"A male voice shouted above the noise of the hilarity from the windows. "Come on, tits an' all, or no deal. Ri?"

"She lifted her tracksuit top and exposed two drooping breasts; they reminded Mags of pictures of famine in Africa. Below the barren breasts were two long irregular shaped wounds and abscesses covered her lower abdomen and legs.

"Over a chorus of obscenities, a voice from the windows shouted. `Fair play la ya. A deal's a deal; here's the bit a shill promised ya.'"

"A balled up sheet of newspaper was thrown from the window and exploded onto the landing. Shit flew in all directions, splashing several of the women. Shrieks of, laughter came from the windows."

Mags then hurries to cover the girl with her tracksuit, little knowing that within six months, she herself will submit to even worse humiliations, including prostitution, in her desperate need for heroin. Within months, she will have been released and rearrested and, in the throes of withdrawal in prison, will slash herself with a razor blade in a genuine suicide: attempt. Whether or not she dies is left to the reader to imagine.

Roberts says that he never witnessed any of these scenes, including the degradation of the naked woman in the prison yard. He has been in that yard. He was never in a women's prison cell, but he knows what went on there. And while his story does not relate to any specific ease of an innocent teenager who is corrupted by prison life after being incarcerated for a relatively petty offence, he does know that such things have occurred.

WALKING the line between fiction and reality, he reveals his knowledge of life for, women prisoners in Mountjoy. Words like "bleak" and "harrowing" are hardly adequate to describe the unremittingly obscene and, often, disgusting action of the novel, with its candid scenes of heroin injection into pus filled veins and prostitution on the canal. Accentuating this horror, is a fictional device which Roberts uses to objectify Mags's suffering. The novel is introduced and constantly interrupted by the fictitious character of Sean Howard, a thoroughly despicable Department of Justice official, an expert in prison history and policy and a far right founder of the Christian Coalition Party. Roberts himself describes Howard as a "pedantic, misogynist, sleazebag".

Roberts's conceit is that Howard stumbled upon the novel, The Rasherhouse, which was written by a female prisoner who has since died of AIDS. Howard is sharing the novel with us because the dead writer embodies not just the degradation of the prisoners but also their belief that they are victims of an unjust society - a belief encouraged, as Howard sees it, by feminist radicals. Howard keeps interrupting the action, of the "novel" to "deconstruct it, using Mags's life as an example of how prisons have failed people like her by being too liberal. Howard's ideal prison would have prisoners isolated in cells where they could not contaminate each other.

Roberts believes that a fair proportion of the Irish population shares Howard's views that Mountjoy prison - with its slopping out and its cramped stinking cells and its showers and toilets which afford no privacy - is too good for the likes of Mags. Roberts, on the other hand, says: "I am totally against prisons. They are changing disturbed people into bitter, twisted and disturbed people."

He says that he wrote the novel - because he wanted the general public to understand the full horror of incarceration. "At first I thought I'd do a Master's degree in it but who would read it? You can't convey it except through art. I wanted to stimulate debate around crime and punishment."

However, some people may, rightly or wrongly, see another agenda which is the "entertainment value" of Roberts's sensational descriptions of life for women in Mountjoy, including lesbian sex scenes. Roberts is plainly shocked to be asked the following question: did he ask permission of the women prisoners he had known to write about their world? And was there any danger of a conflict of interest between his work with these traumatised female prisoners and the writing of fiction about lives like theirs?

He says that he sees no conflict of interest because the book is fiction. He stresses that The Rasherhouse is a novel and that it contains nothing which his women students told him. It is all based on observation, rather than on any confidences shared by his female students.

"We never discussed (life within the cells) and I never asked. That's not to say that you wouldn't see the bruises and the trackmarks and the general upset and depression and confusion," he says.

Because he never looked for information from the women, he did not see the need to ask their permission. "I never invaded anyone's privacy so it never struck me that to write a novel one would need permission from anyone," he says.

It is several years since he taught women in Mountjoy but even so did he risk betraying the women he had known? "Quite the contrary. What I hoped was that a voice would be given to a group of, people who were powerless and that it would raise public awareness of prison life."

The message he would like to go out, is that "When we put our brothers and sisters into cages this is the kind of thing that can happen. It's a work of fiction and literature and . . . this is a light shining into a dark corner of society. We are like consumer junkies in denial and we don't care that we have marginalised a large number of people in society. Twenty eight per cent of kids are living in poverty and most of them will do fine but a certain number won't make it and will be embittered and end up going to prison."

Prison, for Roberts, should be a place of safety where "your daughter or my son" may go for rehabilitation, education, counselling and therapy.

Roberts (47) left school at the age of 13 as a direct result, he says, of being abused at the hands of the Christian Brothers. "They beat me and humiliated me and insisted that I was stupid and beat me stupid. I left them convinced that I was brain damaged," he says.

From the age of 13, Roberts worked in as many as 45 different jobs, eventually ending up with his wife and six month old baby as the manager of a youth hostel on Cape Clear in West Cork. For 10 years, he endured the "pain of boredom" in a place which had "no theatre, no sports, no cinema and no TV". In 1986, he found an escape by enrolling in University College Cork as a mature student and in 1989 earned an honours degree in philosophy and history.

He soon got a job with the VEC teaching in prisons and has since taught in most prisons in the State. His course is called "Polities, Ideology, Self and Society". Now separated from his wife and with his children in their early 20s, Roberts lives in Islandbridge on the Liffey.

Still a teacher in Mountjoy prison, Roberts will this week be receiving reaction to his novel not just from the critics, but from those who matter most, the prison officers and inmates of Mountjoy. The prison officers should be pleased to see themselves portrayed as highly sympathetic. "They are the best in Europe. It's a difficult job and most of them do it extremely well," says Roberts. The critique which would be most interesting to hear, however, would be that of the women prisoners.