Madam, - On Sunday, March 7th, our group Women in Media and Entertainment, together with members of the African Women's Network AKIDWA, went to the Dóchas Centre at Mountjoy Prison to celebrate International Women's Day and the 5th Global Women's Strike with the women there.
May we endorse everything Christina Quinlan wrote in her letter of March 10th, particularly her condemnation of Michael McDowell's current policy of closing the enlightened new women's prison and selling the land for commercial profit?
Does his vision of profit go as far as the privatisation of prisons, as in the US and (little by little) in the UK? Once incarceration becomes a business activity, jails will have to be kept full and there will be a continual demand for growth.
Governor Lonergan and others have regularly pointed out that most of the women in prison would not be there but for economic and cultural deprivation. If the resources of care put into the Mountjoy Dóchas Centre were freely available to women and children outside prison, with a 100 per cent health service, most of them would not be sentenced to jail terms at all.
An additional point: how can the Minister of Justice, Equality and Law Reform justify his job-description when his cabinet colleague (for Social and Family Affairs) has introduced her ferocious 16-point list of cutbacks, with immediate effect upon women discharged from prison? Is he aware that a woman sent to jail is automatically evicted from council housing if she is the signatory tenant?
Relatives willing to move in and look after her children are not permitted to take over the tenancy. The house or flat goes back on the housing list and the family is shifted to the bottom of the list. Furthermore, the ex-prisoner will find she can be refused rent allowance because she has not been paying rent for six months.
Is this justice? is it equality? or would we call it reformed law? - Yours, etc.,
MARGARETTA D'ARCY, Chairperson, Women in Media and Entertainment, St Bridget's Place Lower, Galway.