If I ever get sent down, give me a choice between six months inside, to be led away in handcuffs, or a year of hard time but with the dignity of going to the prison van with my arms folded, and I will choose the latter, writes John Waters.
There are certain addresses for which neither jail sentences nor handcuffs hold much terror, but for the rest of us the prospect of either is a nightmare scenario. However, it is one thing to be imprisoned on behalf of society, and quite another to be got up in such a way on the way to the van as to be stripped of all dignity, shamed before family and neighbours, clearly signalled as no longer a full citizen, but something else: a common criminal, a jailbird, a lag.
To be led away with your arms dangling, or folded, or hands in pockets, is different. Sure, you have been convicted and sentenced, but it is not such a big deal. You are being led away, yes, but by another member of the human race, who may even feel sympathetic to your plight. You might be walking to the shops. When your sentence is over, you will resume your role as a decent member of society, with no public record of your humiliation.
Last Wednesday, this newspaper carried on page four a report of a court case in which two defendants, found guilty of perverting the course of justice, had each been sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, nine months suspended. One, a Court Service employee, had suppressed a drink-driving summons in respect of the other, a taxi driver. Even more interesting were two photographs carried above the report, of the convicted persons being led away to begin their sentences. One showed the Court Service official, Sorcha O'Meara, walking with arms folded, the other the taxi driver, Derek Behan, handcuffed and apparently chained to the prison officer escorting him.
In imposing the sentences, Judge Catherine Delahunt was categorical in her condemnations of both defendants. She said they had "corrupted" the criminal justice system. She made no differentiation between them, handing down the same sentence to each. Nor did she issue any instruction that one was to be humiliated before the nation and the other treated as though the unfortunate victim of a misunderstanding and led away in a manner commensurate with her human dignity.
Derek Behan, then, appears somehow to have come in for an additional, extra-judicial tariff, not quite tarring-and-feathering, but, for a previously law-abiding citizen, not significantly less unpleasant.
Last time I raised this, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice told me that the question of handcuffing prisoners is "an operational matter for prison officers on a particular day". A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service explained that, although he was unaware of any legislative or regulatory basis for this, the policy is that male prisoners are handcuffed "almost always" and female prisoners "almost never". It is, I was told, a matter of the security of prisoners and prison officers and also a precaution to prevent drugs being passed to prisoners being led from court. Both spokespersons categorically denied that handcuffs are used as part of the punishment of a prisoner.
Article 40.1 of the Constitution states: "All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law. This shall not be held to mean that the State shall not in its enactments have due regard to differences of capacity, physical and moral, and of social function". There is no enactment of the Oireachtas providing for the additional punishment of prisoners because they are male.
Nevertheless, it is the routine practice of the Irish Prison Service that male prisoners be treated differently to female prisoners, the reasons apparently offered being (1) security, and/or (2) that males are more likely to have people try to pass drugs to them.
Let us consider, then, the respective risks posed by Sorcha O'Meara and Derek Behan. O'Meara's solicitor told the court that his client had worked for seven years in the Courts Service and had an unblemished record. She had no previous convictions and had co-operated with the Garda investigation. Behan was said by his solicitor to have acted out of character and to have co-operated fully with gardaí.
Neither defendant had any recorded history of violent behaviour or in relation to drugs.
From these facts the conclusion is unavoidable that we have arrived, by some mysterious process, at a de facto State policy involving the additional, gratuitous humiliation of male prisoners, without a legal or constitutional basis, and that nobody - not the Equality Authority, not the celebrated liberal governor of Mountjoy Prison, not the Joint Committee on Justice, ha-ha, Equality, ha-ha-ha, and, ha-ha-ha-ha, Women's Rights - sees anything untoward in this.
Indeed, those two photographs side by side in last Wednesday's Irish Times spoke volumes about the quality of equality in this society, eloquently depicting the perversion of language and reason that has been surreptitiously installed at the heart of public affairs. The headline, deliciously, read: "Corruption Case".