Siege highlights need for penal reform

THE current Mountjoy hostage crisis concentrates the public mind on the harsh realities of prison life in a way that a dozen Whitaker reports could not.

It is no surprise that this incident should occur in the Separation Unit, which is noted for some of the worst conditions in the system and houses some of the more hardened and defiant prisoners.

The Department of Justice's policy of patient negotiation is the correct approach to the present crisis since the safety of the prison officers and prisoners involved must be of paramount importance.

Prison life is always in a precarious balance somewhere between the smooth running military like order the authorities wish to impose and the anarchy which would ensue if prisoners had the freedom to behave as they wished.

However, the potential for disorder is ever present, and it is always possible for a prisoner or a group of prisoners to exploit the trust prison officers normally place in them. Hostage taking is one of the most serious breaches of this trust and can do untold damage to the general climate in the prisons.

The everyday functioning of the system depends to an extraordinary degree on the compliance of the prisoners and their willingness to conform to customary patterns which enable the prison to work. Not all prisoners are capable of submitting to these mundane conventions of prison. Many have highly disturbed family backgrounds, often compounded by psychiatric, alcohol or intravenous drug problems.

There is inevitably a great deal of anger, hostility and frustration in prison, and unfortunately this frequently spills over into incidents such as assaults, violence against property and self injury.

While the Irish prison system is generally noted for the humanity of its staff, and this has undoubtedly kept serious incidents to a minimum, there are many deficiencies in our penal system, both in its physical facilities and in its regime, which tend to add to the tension of prison life here and make incidents of protest and violence more likely.

Mountjoy Prison itself is an obsolete Victorian institution totally unsuited to modern requirements. It is grossly overcrowded, with many cells designed for single occupancy currently holding two prisoners. It lacks basic sanitation facilities, still relying on the slopping out of night buckets, and has a very inadequate infrastructure for educational and occupational activities. The majority of prisoners have little or no purposeful activity to fill the long hours and most are locked in their cells for 18 or more hours a day.

The Whitaker Committee's ideal of a constructive, rehabilitative form of imprisonment is unthinkable in such an environment. It is no surprise that the prisoners' own culture is strongly drug oriented.

The Separation Unit is an isolation prison within Mountjoy and has for many years housed mainly HIV positive prisoners and those ill with AIDS. It has a chillingly brutal and claustrophobic atmosphere and minimal facilities and is utterly unsuitable to housing human beings, let alone sick and often emotionally distressed prisoners.

It has survived by affording its inmates a more lax regime than pertains in the main prison in order to compensate for the appalling conditions of the unit. The AIDS prisoners now have access to decent facilities within the new Medical Unit but, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, given the current accommodation crisis within the prison system, the Separation Unit has remained in commission as a place to house disruptive prisoners.

In this new situation it is likely that there has been a significant tightening of discipline. The predictable result of such moves is that the desperation and sense of grievance of already disaffected prisoners will be greatly increased.

It is in fact a basic principle of sound prison management, generally ignored here, that prisoners who are isolated and placed under conditions of especially tight security should still have access to the best available material conditions and rehabilitative facilities even if they are being isolated because of their own disruptive and ill disciplined behaviour.

Hostage taking is, of course, very dangerous and highly reprehensible, and it is an utterly unacceptable form of protest. In the long run it can serve mainly to alienate the essential goals of prison reform.

IT would be a mistake not to acknowledge the need for a truly radical approach to the reform penal system. Recent social concern, as in the bail referendum, has focused on the need for more effective means for curbing criminals.

However, the current crisis in ing need to balance society's desire to curtail crime with a genuine commitment to a more humane form of punishment which maximises the potential for rehabilitation and reintegration into law abiding society.

An important aspect of this protest is the glaring deficiency within the system due to the failure to appoint an Independent Prisons' Inspectorate. This reform was recommended more than a decade ago by Whitaker and was promised by the Department of Justice in 1994.

An independent inspector could have played an important role in averting the current crisis in two ways by drawing attention to the often neglected, darker corners of the prison system, such as the Separation Unit, and by providing prisoners with a receptive, independent and potentially influential channel for their justified protests.

While the immediate imperative is to secure the safe release of the hostages in Mountjoy, the implications of the crisis are far reaching and especially relevant because of the recent decision to create an Independent Prisons Board. The Department of Justice's management of the penal system has clearly been unsuccessful.

It is now vital that there be a lively and informed public debate on the structure and form of the new system of prison management. We need to find the best possible arrangement for an energetic, effective and accountable new system of management which will have the will, the ability and the resources to tackle the immense problems of the penal, system.