THE overcrowding and lack of space in Mountjoy are obvious wherever you go. In the women's prison, a separate unit with 40 prisoners, a group of 12 is enjoying an aerobics class. The narrow gym was made by knocking down the walls dividing three cells. The aerobics routine can allow only two steps to the left, and two back to the right.
In the main prison, four wings with 630 men in an area built for 480, the stairs and corridors are crowded at tea time. Prisoners are returning from the kitchen with trays of food (carton of milk, fishfingers and beans) to eat in their cells. There is no eating area.
There is surprisingly little noise - occasional shouting among prisoners and more from prison officers seeking those meant to be back in their cells by now.
Every cell features one or more buckets - "slopping out" is still a feature of life in Mountjoy. The prisoners spend about 16 hours of every 24 locked up. All are allowed a radio "and if they can't afford one we'll try and get one for them," says the Governor, John Lonergan. Time outside cells is spent in the recreation areas" of the landings, or in the yards, or working in the kitchens or workshops. Staff say there is work, such as making jeans and basic wooden furniture, for every prisoner who wants it. Kitchen work is considered a prize by some - it pays £2 a day on top of the £1 daily every prisoner gets to spend in the prison shop.
The most dispiriting part of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin is probably the visiting area, where the mothers and wives and girlfriends and children from the real world get a chance to see their locked up loved ones.
The visiting area is made up of three long rooms, a table with a barrier on top running down the centre of each, and seats fixed to the floor of each side.
At each end of the tables two prison officers watch from high stools - their job is to spot drugs or any other contraband being passed to the prisoners. "They've all sorts of ways," says a prison officer. "They'd kiss each other, or touch, or shake hands, hold the baby up and it would be hidden in the baby's clothes". Prisoners receiving drugs - normally tablets or a tiny package of heroin the size of half a small fingernail - quickly reach down into their jeans and hide them in their bodies.
There are four colour video cameras in each visiting room, and a nearby control centre is taping at all times. Sometimes a still picture confirming drugs have been passed over can be produced before the visitor has left the prison. Remand prisoners are allowed a daily visit, convicts one per week.
Last year the officers and cameras detected 490 occasions on which drugs or other contraband was passed, says Mr Lonergan. There are separate glass box visiting rooms for the worst offenders.
"Two and a half weeks ago there was a woman came in here with packages of heroin up her nose, says Mr Lonergan. "The doctor here couldn't get one of them down, and we had to send her to the Mater and the doctor there got it out, but he said it was `very tricky'. He said if he'd punctured it she would have died."
In a small office not far from the visiting room, chief officer Vincent Duffy empties two large jars of drugs on to his desk, his haul for last year. One pile is of small chunks of cannabis resin, the other is made up of about 200 packages of heroin and assorted tablets, including ecstasy. In a prison where 65 per cent of the 630 prisoners admit using heroin, the two heaps on the desk do not look like a huge quantity.
"For every person we catch with drugs, there's maybe half a dozen we don't catch," says Mr Duffy.
The overcrowding in the main Mountjoy jail is especially acute in the corridor where prisoners are housed when they first arrive. Here eight or nine men are sometimes squeezed into a four man cell, until they can be assessed the next morning and a space in another cell is found. Of the 480 single cells, 120 accommodate two prisoners.
The officers know surprisingly little about new prisoners. "All we get is a warrant, so we know the offence and the sentence, and the name they've been convicted under," says Mr Lonergan. "Everything else we know about them is what they tell us."
But the staff knows the 50 or 60 psychiatric cases who are always passing through Mountjoy.