Implementing a drugs-free regime in jails is one of the toughest tasks facing Brian Purcell, head of the prison service, he tells Conor Lally
Brian Purcell perhaps knows more than any other civil servant about the pitfalls of dealing with criminals. Seventeen years ago when he worked as a higher executive officer in the Department of Social Welfare he signed the paperwork stopping weekly dole payments of £92 to the Dublin underworld boss Martin Cahill, who was known as the General.
For his troubles Purcell was abducted from his Dublin home in the early hours by four hooded men, who had tied up his pregnant wife as the couple's two sons slept. They took Purcell away in his family car and drove him to Cahill. The infamous criminal shot the civil servant twice in the legs.
He later sent Purcell a get-well card as he was recovering in hospital that read: "The General prognosis is good".
Cahill, who was shot dead by the IRA in August 1994, is perhaps best remembered for stripping to his Mickey Mouse boxer shorts for the television cameras outside a court house after he had (yet again) escaped the long arm of the law.
But there weren't many jokes the night he shot Brian Purcell, who is now the director general of the Irish Prison Service.
"An encounter like that would probably shake you up all right," Purcell offers reluctantly when asked about the ordeal. "I think it's fair to say it's not an experience to be recommended. You never forget something like that and you can't say it had no effect on you, but it just becomes part of what you are."
Speaking to The Irish Times this week in his first interview since taking the director general's job nearly two years ago, he says he hopes he will be remembered for things other than being The Man The General Shot.
THE PRISON SERVICE'S biggest building project is now underway. A new 1,350-bed Mountjoy prison at Thornton Hall in north Co Dublin will replace the current Mountjoy complex on Dublin's North Circular Road. A new 450-bed prison on Spike Island, Cork, will replace both the now closed jail on the island and Cork Prison on the mainland.
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has also committed the prison service to the ambitious target of implementing a drug-free regime across its 14 facilities.
Amid all that, inspector of prisons Mr Justice Dermot Kinlen, while attending last month's Prison Officers' Association annual conference in Killarney, launched a scathing attack on the prison service, calling it a "failure".
"You urinate and defecate in the cell while the other lads are having their lunch," he said of the conditions at Cork Prison.
Mr Justice Kinlen also said key rehabilitative elements of the prison service, such as 18 workshops in Dublin's St Patrick's Institution for young offenders, had been closed.
Purcell says he has nothing but admiration for Mr Justice Kinlen's professional record and points out that many of his criticisms were constructive. However, he responds strongly to the criticisms.
On Mr Justice Kinlen's description of Cork Prison being "an open lavatory", Purcell says: "I don't agree with that. In fact I reject it. We have problems in Cork Prison in relation to in-cell sanitation. But they're going to be addressed by moving to the new development on Spike Island."
"His comment about the sex offenders' treatment programme in Arbour Hill being a 'so-called treatment programme' would be completely at variance with expert views," he adds. Mr Justice Kinlen was also critical of the low numbers of inmates on the treatment programme at any one time.
"It's quite stressful [ for these prisoners] having to face up to, what are in many cases, absolute horrific and outrageous crimes, and they've got to face up to those crimes in a very provocative way," says Purcell. " It's really put up to them. Unfortunately not all people who would benefit from a course like that are able to undergo it."
But Purcell is particularly critical of the suggestions that beneficial workshops remain closed in order to assist the prison service in a books-balancing exercise.
"I don't know where he [ Mr Justice Kinlen] got the figure for 18 workshops. As far as we can find out going back through the records the most workshops we ever had in St Patrick's at any given time was 10."
He points out the 1985 Whitaker report into prison reform concluded that many of the workshops at St Patrick's were menial and did little, if anything, to rehabilitate offenders.
"So the glory days that Judge Kinlen is harking back to I think are more in the imagination than in reality. It doesn't really stand up to any close examination."
Purcell dismisses a suggestion by the former High Court judge that a system of conjugal visits should be implemented.
"We're not [ running] a family planning clinic," he says.
On the possibility of privatising one prison to assess its success or otherwise, as Justice Kinlen has suggested, Purcell says it is not currently on the agenda but that he has an open mind. It is an attitude likely to raise more than a few eyebrows in the ranks of the Prison Officers' Association.
The Government agreed to drop plans to privatise some elements of the service after the dispute on overtime was resolved last year.
"If you had a private prison running alongside publicly-run prisons it gives you an opportunity to benchmark one against the other," Purcell says. "And that in itself can't be a bad thing."
HE DOES NOT believe Irish society is becoming more violent. Public fears around serious crime, while understandable, are in a large part driven by the media, he suggests.
He sees his two biggest challenges ahead as the implementation of the drug-free regime and overseeing the prison building programme.
Under the new regime, about 10 per cent of the 3,200 inmates in the system will be randomly tested for drugs each month. Those testing positive will face sanctions such as reduced visiting hours and possible loss of remission. Anybody volunteering to be tested regularly will be offered rewards such as an enhanced diet, including treats like doughnuts and orange juice.
In an effort to reduce the supply of drugs coming into prison, visits will be monitored by CCTV. Some inmates with a history of drug abuse will be allowed to see their loved ones only from behind glass. Sniffer dogs will also be used to check visitors entering the prison.
The dogs have been used on a pilot basis in the Midlands Prison, Portlaoise, in the past two weeks. "Interestingly", Purcell says, visitor numbers have declined "by around one sixth" in the period.
He rejects the widely held view that some inmates go into prison drug-free only to emerge with an intravenous drug habit. "Virtually all" inmates who emerge from prison using drugs intravenously brought the habit into prison with them, he says.
The drug-free regime will be primarily aimed at cocaine and heroin users. However, he stops short of promising a completely drug-free environment.
"Look, I think it'll be very difficult to get to a situation [ where] with your hands on your heart, you could say that there's absolutely no drug use in our prisons. But if we do this properly we can go a good distance down the road."
When asked if organised gangs were running their drugs empires from prison via mobile phone, as many gardaí believe, he accepts there is a problem with smuggled phones within the prison system.
"We've been examining various types of technology that would, if we were able to deploy them, block out signals."
Looking ahead to the construction of the new Mountjoy Prison - construction will begin next April - he rejects suggestions that it will be a US-style super prison where high inmate numbers will be prioritised over the creation of a rehabilitation-led environment.
"One thousand prisoners on 20 acres in Mountjoy, that's acceptable? To me putting 1,350 prisoners on a 150-acre site is a much better proposition," he says of the project.
"Even the very concept of walking into a prison - and I've seen thisin prisons outside Ireland where you have a big site - the moment you step out of the cell blocks there's a sense of space around you.
"And something like that, I think, is conducive to facilitating the rehabilitation of prisoners; open spaces, a lot of air and light, facilities other than yards surrounded by grey brick upon grey brick with a glimpse of sky. It's the lonely prison wall isn't it?"