Violence inside: a growing problem in Irish prisons

Overcrowding, drugs and gang affiliations are behind the high level of violence in our prisons – a good behaviour scheme is among measures to try to curb it

When he stepped out on that Friday evening in Dublin two years ago, Declan O’Reilly knew his was a phoney sort of freedom. He’d just been acquitted of stabbing Derek Glennon to death in prison after pleading self-defence.

But the dead man was a gangland criminal; he was connected. O’Reilly knew he’d be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. He was murdered in revenge for the Glennon killing last September, 18 months after his acquittal.

The story of Declan O’Reilly and Derek Glennon encapsulates the laws of the prison jungle.

Glennon was a 24-year-old from Crumlin in Dublin, jailed for killing a cyclist while driving a stolen car.

He had once killed a man with a semi-automatic pistol in a Dublin pub because he had been humiliated in a fight in a Chinese takeaway the previous night. And he had threatened a prison officer with a gun during a prison escape.

He constantly clashed with prison officers and other prisoners. He had been the subject of more than 50 disciplinary reports as he and the group he assembled around him attempted to exert their control on the D-Wing landing of Mountjoy that they called home.

But on the evening of June 27th, 2007, O’Reilly snapped after months of threats, intimidation and pressure he had endured at the hands of Glennon.

They became involved in a brief struggle in a ground-floor corridor and, using a knife Glennon had forced him to hide in his cell for him, O’Reilly stabbed him repeatedly through the heart, lungs, stomach and arm.

O’Reilly later told gardaí Glennon had been bullying him for months, forcing him to hide syringes, drugs and mobile phones on his behalf, punching him and threatening to have his brother shot. He said he was terrified to leave his cell every day.

“He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was texting my brother saying he would cut me up.”

Immediately after he was killed, Glennon’s associates went to work. Before he was even buried they threw a hand grenade into a house in Crumlin in an attack aimed at O’Reilly’s family.

In September 2011, just seven months after his plea of self-defence was accepted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court, O’Reilly was shot and wounded in Harold’s Cross, Dublin.

Some 12 months later, almost to the day, he was shot again, this time fatally, as he walked with his 10-year-old son on the South Circular Road in Dublin.

Routine threats

A prison officer who spoke to The Irish Times said prisoners are “told they’ll be stabbed or beaten unless a visitor brings in the stuff to them” or unless they bring it back to the prison themselves when they get out on temporary release.

Staff in prisons have to continuously assess gang affiliations outside the prison and the development of any disputes or rivalries inside the walls.

They try to house prisoners at odds with each other as far apart as possible.

About 40 prisoners seen as the greatest security threats are accommodated on the E1 landing in Portlaoise Prison, which is effectively reserved for gangland leaders.

Up to 25 per cent of inmates are classified as “protection prisoners”, meaning they are locked away in cells, in some cases for up to 23 hours a day, to protect them from attack by those in the main prison population.

Jim Mitchell, deputy general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, said the nature of violence inside jails has mirrored what has been witnessed with gangland crime and in wider society.

“Rows are not settled in a fight any more; it’s all much higher levels of violence now. And a lot of the violence in jail is drug-related. Prisoners owe money for drugs they have used in prison or before they came in. Or they are being pressured by other prisoners or prison gangs to smuggle in drugs, phones and weapons or to store them for other prisoners who don’t want to get caught with them.

“That’s why so many of them are under threat and why the protection prisoner numbers are so high now.”

New rewards system

He believes a new incentivised regime being rolled out by the Irish Prison Service may help ease tensions in that it gives prisoners rewards for good behaviour.

But he believes the overcrowding is still very high and that prisoners are bored because educational, recreational and workshop activities are often not available.

Under the regime, additional small privileges have been introduced to encourage better conduct.

Plum jobs, such as posts in the kitchen – which keep prisoners occupied all day and give them access to more food – have been offered to trustee prisoners.

They have also been given the new cells in the renovated wings of some prisons.

They can also be granted additional phone calls to family members, have more contact with visitors and be permitted to have XBox video games to play on the small televisions in all prison cells.

While all prisoners are entitled to a 95c gratuity each day to pay towards items from the tuck shop, including cigarettes, those who work their way up the incentivised regime can receive €1.75 or €2.25.

More facilities

The executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, Liam Herrick, believes violence and prison gangs could be eased and controlled if the State tended towards a system of housing prisoners in a greater number of smaller prisons.

Having more facilities would give staff more options to house rival criminals away from each other, making redundant the need for such large numbers in protective custody to provide services for them.

He accepts that in the current financial climate the construction of new jails is not an option but says the State is not handcuffed completely by financial constraints, saying the example of Wheatfield Prison in Dublin should be studied closely and repeated elsewhere.

Wheatfield Prison

“They have divided the jail into sections. They have one section that completely runs on the incentivised regime. Because the prisoners are all on a rewards system the conduct is better. There can be lower levels of security, more out-of-cell time and single-cell occupancy.”

Herrick said such a regime could be spread to the rest of the prison if overcrowding there was tackled and 150-200 prisoners taken out of the 700-strong prison population.

Some 18 months ago the United Nations Committee Against Torture expressed its concerns at the level of violence in Irish jails.

One of its recommendations about reducing violence was to target the main causes of it, “such as the availability of drugs, the existence of feuding gangs, lack of purposeful activities, lack of space and poor material conditions”.

For its part, the Irish Prison Service says it has introduced a raft of measures in recent years to tackle the issue.

This includes the establishment of the 145-strong operation support group to gather intelligence on those controlling the flow of contraband in jails and to search the prison, including cells, for items.

It has also introduced airport-style security screening and sniffer dogs to detect contraband being smuggled in by visitors.

Nets have also been erected over exercise yards in which items thrown from people outside the prison walls can be caught. A new Body Orifice Security Scanner chair has also been used to scan prisoners and visitors for items they have concealed internally.

The result has been a significant reduction in the number of smuggled items being seized in the past four years after initially high rates of seizures.

Provisional figures for 2012 show 1,131 mobile phones were seized across the institutions, down 15 per cent on 2011 and 48 per cent since 2009, the first full year of the new measures.

Similarly, the number of drug seizures reached 1,180 last year, down 14 per cent on 2011 and a 32 per cent drop on 2009.

Drug treatment

Dr Kevin Warner worked in the Department of Justice as national co-ordinator of prison education from 1979 to 2009. He believes overcrowding is a key issue in the stress, tension and bullying that results in high levels of prison violence.

However, he suggests it is the treatment of prisoners’ drug addiction, not just efforts to reduce the drug supply, that is the key to having an enlightened and effective prison system with reduced violence.

He says that in Denmark a prisoner in the last three months of a sentence who asks for drug treatment is guaranteed to receive it within two weeks.

In one east Jutland prison he visited when completing his PhD in 2009, a ground-breaking approach had been taken.

“One-third of the entire prison is given over to full-time drug treatment for as long as people need. Compare that with the nine beds in Mountjoy Prison for our entire [4,500-berth] system.”