A prisoner sleepily stumbled across his darkened cell last Wednesday morning to go to the toilet. It was just after 4 a.m., and A2 landing at Mountjoy was silent as hundreds of inmates slept in overcrowded cells.

The prisoner noticed a shape near the window. As he stepped closer, the moonlight revealed the body of his cellmate, a 25-year-old man, attached to a bar on the window by his bedsheet.

The prisoner called for assistance and prison officers rushed in and attempted to resuscitate the man on the floor. They got no response and he was rushed to the nearby Mater Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

It was the first time in prison for Bill, which is not his real name. He had a reasonable chance of being released within a few weeks and had been described as "fit and well" when examined upon committal by the prison doctor.

Bill was in prison because he had stolen a coat worth £40 from a shop in Carlow. He ended up in Mountjoy after being sentenced to three months in late October.

He was a long way from his middle-class suburb in Co Limerick when he died. He had drifted from the city after he ran foul of the law. Unlike some other prisoners who have taken their lives in prison, he did not leave a note. According to prison sources he was "quiet, but good-humoured".

His broad Limerick accent marked him out in a prison which is predominantly populated by Dubliners, many from the same areas of the city.

"He appeared a little nervous and kept to himself," said the source. Violence between prisoners is common, and many first-time prisoners find the atmosphere at the jail menacing and have to spend their time watching their backs.

Bill was serving one of the shortest sentences in the prison, for what one prison source described as a "Mickey Mouse offence".

Prison sources said the reason the young man ended his life is not clear. But one possible explanation came from people familiar with his case - he felt he had brought stigma upon his family by ending up in Mountjoy.

"He would be like a lot of prisoners who come here for the first time. There can be a great sense of shame, and the prisoner can end up thinking, I've let everyone down. The length of their sentence does not alter that," the source said.

However, like all suicides the pain is increased because people can only speculate on the motivation of the victim, and there is little hard information to fill the void.

The prison's governor, John Lonergan, said a "complex number of reasons" are usually behind a prison suicide. Prisoners could be deeply affected by the loneliness of prison, and events from outside, like the ending of a relationship, could also plunge inmates into bleak troughs.

Sources in Limerick who knew the man said he "drifted" into crime and had no known associations with criminal gangs in the city. He was a slim, dark-haired, "pleasant-looking young man" who had a "softness" about him and was from a "decent, respectable family" in an east Limerick middle-class suburb.

All around the area the signs of the booming economy can be seen, with the computer company, Dell, situated nearby, employing thousands of locals. But Bill left school before doing his Intermediate Certificate and could never hope to sample any of this.

He drifted into petty crime in his teens for no apparent reason, Garda sources in the city said. When he was arrested for stealing the coat in Co Carlow he had been living away from home for some time.

He had a conviction for cheque forgery and larceny in Limerick city, and his troubles with the law there prompted him to drift away. When he wound up in Co Carlow he was without much money or friends, said the sources.

Described by gardai in Limerick as "mixed up", the young man had a lifestyle that was said to have "broken his parents' hearts". His father, a former skilled craftsman, and mother are now retired and were grieving in private this week. They asked that he not be identified.

A few years ago one point of contact for the restless teenager was a local priest. "He was pleasant to meet, a charmer, outgoing. There was a softness in him, a gentleness," said the priest, who did not wish to be named.

"There are no problems with other kids in the family. He just seemed to get into the criminal way. He would come to me for a touch. He'd have some story of why he needed money," he remembered.

It was not unusual for young people in the middle-class parish to get into petty crime, the priest said. "Recently a 19-year-old who had been troublesome in school and involved in breaking and entering cut his wrists in front of his parents. They are still in an awful way," he said.

He had experienced an "epidemic" of suicides among young men in another parish, but he could find no common threads in the deaths. "One thing is that although young criminal men appear to be pretty tough, there seems to be an inability to accept the consequences of their actions," he said.

The man was not believed to have been involved in drugs. Local people remember him working in a local pub collecting glasses.

One of the teachers at his national school remembers a child of "normal ability" who was slightly smaller than other children and slightly untidy.

Teachers at his secondary school remembered a quiet, mannerly teenager who was normally placed in the middle of his class and who had a sense of humour and got on with other pupils.

"There was nothing to suggest any underlying depression. He did not seem to be the type to be worried about," said a teacher. While at school he had held a part-time job, but to leave before doing the Intermediate Certificate exam was "relatively unusual" in the school.

Reacting to the man's suicide, Father Joe Young, a priest who works with youth in Limerick, said community service orders would be a more productive way of dealing with minor offences among young people than custodial sentences. Many of them suffered from isolation and depression, he said.

"We talk about overcrowding in our prisons, but we never talk about the alternatives. We should be pumping resources into prevention, and it should begin in primary school. "Too many young people are falling through the net in primary and secondary school. Isolation leads to a situation where they can get everything inflated and blown out of proportion," he said.

"By then it is too late. They literally are no longer able to connect with family and community. They have stepped outside the protective wall of the human community," Father Young added.

BUT why was Bill sent to jail for stealing a coat worth £40? He was not alone in spending time in Mountjoy for a petty larceny offence, it seems. John Lonergan said between 50 and 60 inmates were there at any one time for petty larceny offences.

He said most of these were imprisoned because they had committed the larcenies repeatedly. However, he said he had come across cases of prisoners with just two larceny convictions who were committed to Mountjoy.

Ivana Bacik, Reid Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at Trinity College Dublin, who often represents teenagers facing petty crime offences, said there was no reason for shoplifters or people convicted of larceny to be given a custodial sentence.

"Most judges seem to operate a rule of thumb, that nobody is imprisoned on a first petty offence. But repeated larcenies and a custodial sentence tend to be imposed," she said.

Patrick O'Dea, a probation officer with IMPACT, said alternatives to prison had to be developed. "One of the new approaches being used in other states at present is the restorative justice model, where the perpetrator agrees to make amends directly to the victim. We should be looking at that," he said. And greater development of community service orders was also needed.

Next week the national steering group of deaths in custody meets to assess whether new measures are needed to reduce the number of prison suicides. No matter what they decide, it will come too late for the three young men who have taken their lives in the last month.

It is the policy of The Irish Times not to disclose the identity of suicide victims where precise identity in unnecessary and to do so would only add to the distress of the family