Survival tips for the high profile prisoner

Both jeered and cheered on his arrival in prison this week, what can George Michael learn from the experience of other celebrity inmates?

WHEN George Michael began his four-week jail term on Tuesday, for crashing his car while under the influence of cannabis, he found that prison officers planned to keep him apart from other inmates. Fellow prisoners said Michael was both cheered and jeered when he arrived at Pentonville Prison, in north London; some of them also sang his hits Faithand Freedom.

Michael's detention poses a problem for the prison, as he cannot be moved to a less secure unit because of the nature of his offences. By breakfast time on Wednesday, inmates were reportedly doing their best to get the jailhouse rocking, with the lyrics "Guilty George has got no freedom" sung to the tune of his hit Careless Whisper.

Of course, Michael is not the first celebrity to experience life behind bars. Last year Boy George was jailed for 15 months for false imprisonment, and following his release (he served four months) he managed to take positives from his experience.

“You get a lot of time to think when you’re in prison,” he said. “It’s an enforced period of time. I made lots of friends. I’ve got friends that are out now that I’m still friendly with and probably will always be friendly with. I got so much support from people. I got thousands and thousands of letters from people I don’t know.”

More recently, both Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have had spells in detention, for parole and drug violations, respectively. Las Vegas detention officers had to defend their decision to release Hilton from jail after serving only three hours of a sentence last month, following fears that her prolonged detention would disrupt the population at Clark County Detention Center. The jail’s governor, Jim Dixon, said at the time: “Yeah, she was treated differently so I don’t have a disruption of my process here at the county jail. When you bring somebody in like that, everybody comes over and tries to look at them. I’d have officers attempting to keep inmates away from her. I’d have disruptions.”

Aside from guilty celebrities, there have been several high-profile cases in Ireland in which members of the public have been jailed, either directly or indirectly as a result of their beliefs or in error. One was the late TD Tony Gregory, who spent two weeks in Mountjoy Prison in support of Dublin street traders, reportedly receiving a rapturous reception on arrival. Similarly, in a scene from the film In the Name of the Father, Gerry Conlon is depicted as receiving a warm reception from inmates when he was moved to a UK jail.

But what is life usually like for a person who arrives in prison with a high profile, or who goes to prison as a result of a belief or cause? Does the prison change to suit the prisoner, or does the prisoner, regardless of background, have to adapt to suit the regime? To paraphrase the poet, let’s go inside.

Micheál Ó Seighin became an unlikely prison inmate when, in 2005, he was one of five people jailed for disobeying a court order in relation to Shell’s gas pipeline in Co Mayo. Ó Seighin spent 94 days at Cloverhill Prison, a medium-security facility in Dublin.

“We were an exceptional case and accepted differently, because we were looked on as being innocent by both prison officers and prisoners,” he says. “It’s often forgotten when you talk about jail that prisoners have a very strong ethical sense of right and wrong. They might not be personally bound by it in their own business, but they were very clear on it inside prison.”

Ó Seighin says that while the perception of him may have been different, when it came to prison routines and regulations he was searched in the same way as other inmates and had the same time for public visits and exercise. Yet, rather than try to remain apart from other prisoners, he found that engaging with fellow inmates made life easier.

“On our first night one of the senior officers said to us: ‘Ye better stick together, as this is not a picnic.’ So next day in the yard we stuck together, but after a short while we realised it would not work. We were sticking out like pink elephants in the yard. So we dropped it, and immediately we just mixed with the other prisoners in a normal way – and it made life easier.”

There were subtle differences, though, in the way prison officers treated Ó Seighin, and often he didn’t appreciate these differences until they were pointed out. “I remember one day talking about this, and I was out in the yard and the warden came up to me and said: ‘You are wanted at reception.’

“When I came back one of the prisoners said to me: ‘Did you notice the difference there?’ I said no. He pointed out that when they wanted me to come to reception, they came down to me to tell me. He said: ‘When they want one of us, they roar at us.’ ”

So, given his experience, what advice would Ó Seighin offer to George Michael or any other member of the public going to prison for the first time? “I think it is important to recognise you are an outsider in the system,” he says. “The advice I would give to anyone going in is that the prison regime is there to ensure and try and guarantee the safe running of the prison, so don’t upset how things are run while you are inside.”