MOUNTJOY PRISON governor John Lonergan has said overcrowding in the jail is now so acute and the conditions so “brutal” and “appalling” that they foster inmate drug use rather than help break drug addiction.
He has announced his decision to retire next month, three years early, after 26 years as prison governor.
Mr Lonergan told The Irish Times that prison gangs and inmate bullying were effectively facilitated by overcrowding because it made Mountjoy a much harder facility for staff to control.
The prison system’s population was now at a record of more than 4,000 and would reach 5,000 by the end of the year, according to official projections he had seen.
This was leading to the US-style warehousing of inmates and the loss of many rehabilitative elements within jails.
The Government needed to urgently review the reasons for the increasing rates of imprisonment and alternatives to custodial sentences.
“Mountjoy is 160 years old; it’s falling down,” he said.
“On Tuesday we had 670 inmates. The inspector of Prisons [Judge Michael Reilly] said it should be 540. It’s a long way off that. You cannot do anything with people in that situation except warehousing; end of story.”
Overcrowding was so bad that when the Irish Prison Service spoke of “prison spaces”, it was referring to extra bunks in cells and mattresses on the floors all over the jail rather than beds in cells.
The public “have no perception” of what it is like to spend “five or six years” with almost 700 inmates all “squashed” in with little or no education, training or sanitation facilities.
If numbers were reduced to 540, Mountjoy “would be workable”. Single-cell occupancy would greatly reduce the scope for prison gangs and bullying to flourish.
“If living conditions are brutal, you have a lot of doubling up [in cells designed for one], a lot of idleness, then that supports a drug culture rather than reducing it.”
The drugs issue would not be resolved by simply introducing sniffer dogs to search for drugs. Rehabilitative services were key.
Mr Lonergan blamed Government inaction for the many problems rather than the Irish Prison Service, which he said simply had to manage with its finite resources.
He fully identified with comments by Kathleen McMahon, governor of the Dochas Centre, the Mountjoy jail for women. She recently told The Irish Times she was retiring early because of overcrowding and the undermining of her “impossible” position by “disrespectful” prison service management.
She feared the Dochas Centre was regressing towards a regime of bullying, violence and self-harm.
However, Mr Lonergan said he was retiring, not out of protest, but because, after 42 years working, he wanted to retire.