"I felt disgusted with myself, totally isolated by what I had done and I knew I was going to be relatively isolated in prison."
George (50) describes his feelings as he faced into two weeks on remand in Clover Hill prison last December. Though he doesn't like to describe himself as middle class, he worked in the building trade and "never had to worry about money". Late last year he was arrested and charged with assault, something he says he had "never in [his] life done before".
Being driven to the prison, with prison officers, he says he was "certainly apprehensive."
"The prison officers are in their own world, chatting away about cars, the price of insurance, taking no notice of you at all. You are a non-person, a different type of being," he says. "It is dehumanising, certainly humiliating".
Once into the reception area, his papers checked, he was put into a holding cell with about eight others. "Although a modern cell, it was completely filthy. There was an open toilet in the corner, and one thing you learn in prison is that going to the toilet might well be a public affair.
"A lot of the others in the holding cell were in a pretty drugged condition, there because of problems of their own."
After a few hours he was brought to the "checking-in procedure", where he handed in his mobile phone, keys, and cash (to be returned on release). Following his return to another holding cell he was asked to strip, given a towel, led to another room and given a prison uniform of corduroy trousers and a sweater.
"Then we were called in twos and I was left with this other lad, in his mid-20s I'd say, whom it was clear I would be paired with. The first night he was fairly out-of-it on heroin, but he was a very nice lad.
"We got on well when we were in the cell but outside we didn't socialise at all. He had his own friends there.
"I was different on the basis of age and you find yourself putting on a bit of a Dublin accent to try and fit in. It's not that the other prisoners were nasty to me, they just didn't really react to me at all. But you slowly suss out who you might approach, who might talk to you."
He doesn't feel the prison staff treated him differently to the other prisoners but he does recall a visit to the prison doctor. Having asked to see a psychiatrist, the doctor exclaimed, "What are you doing here?"
"I suppose you could take it to mean `What is a man of your standing doing here?' or "You should know better at your age'."
The only reactions that he dreaded, he says, were those of some of the prison officers, who could "purposely deny or delay things you were entitled to". The food was "excellent" he says and the main thing he missed was his radio. "I would say 80 to 90 per cent of the prisoners and prison officers were A-OK, like the rest of the population. But I wouldn't like to go back there . . . in and out three or four times like some of the lads I met in there."
