Passion for penal reform

IT HAS been a tough week for everyone involved in the Irish prison service. The hostages and their families, shattered by the mental savagery of the waiting game, were the obvious front line casualties. But as a prison officer's wife said through her tears this week, no one in the service will emerge unchanged or unscathed. The Mountjoy prison siege represented a bitter learning curve for many inside and out. As the smoke clears, the clearest lesson for now is that the hostage takers scored an own goal. In some quarters, inevitably, attitudes have hardened.

At the butt of some of the most vitriolic abuse are those who down the years have, been calling for better conditions for Irish prisoners. Valerie Bresnihan, Chairwoman of the Irish Penal Reform Trust and former member of the Mountjoy Visitors Committee, is dismayed but not surprised penal reform was never a fashionable or profitable cause. But the stakes were raised during the siege this week when she gave a radio interview which appeared to underplay the psychological terror for the hostages. During the interview, she said it was important to understand that the prisoners "so far" were "treating the officers humanely and with respect so nothing would be lost by giving up at this stage".

The six prisoners were listening and she knew it, but while most ordinary listeners recognised the delicate game she was being forced to play, others chose to take her statement at face value. In the flurry of blame and abuse that followed, a lesser woman might have locked herself inside her comfortable house in Dublin 4, pulled the phone out of the wall or headed for the nearest golf club. But she doesn't belong to a golf club and it's not in her nature to retreat when the chips are down. Though sensitive to the hurt of those who did not understand her dilemma, she is apologising to no one.

"Going on media in a sensitive situation like this is an enormous responsibility and it was particularly important for people campaigning for penal reform to attempt to call a halt in as far as they could. On Sunday I had two conversations with senior authorities in Mountjoy and another on Monday. I asked for their advice because I know the separation unit I know the tensions that surround the place and the volatility of the whole situation. I am duty bound to seek advice from people who are up to date on the situation so therefore I asked, and accepted, their advice - and that advice was that under no circumstances should I be in any way judgmental about the prisoners. So, although Morning Ireland had an audience of a million people, I was in a sense, only talking to six of them. My primary objective was to keep the situation safe for the officers, to plead for the prisoners to give up and I am fully confident that the four officers in question understood exactly what I was saying".

Forced, ludicrously, to state out loud her belief that "of course hostage taking is a hideous crime", she knows that people like her have an image problem. "Soft headed, blinkered liberals" is about the most printable of the descriptions that were being bandied about this week but no one who meets Valerie Bresnihan could describe her as soft headed or blinkered.

"This", said her father to her husband on her wedding day, "is a very stubborn woman". This stubbornness, she says hasn't always been a virtue "but I have to say it turned out to be a virtue on the Visiting Committee". She is not, says a friend with feeling, a woman to remain silent amid the comfortable assumptions of her class. Her fingerprints for example, were all over the highly critical medical section of the damning 1995 report of the Mountjoy Visitors Committee - a courageous move given that she is married into that notoriously tight profession.

"We do have a middle class problem", she says, "because crime is not middle class - at least not the sort of crime that ends up in Mountjoy, Limerick or wherever. Yes, I have made some people uncomfortable with my work. Frankly, that's their problem". She has clearly ruffled more feathers than even she imagined. Just as her original political appointment to the Visitors' Committee in 1993 came out of the blue, so did her disappointment. When the new appointees to the Visitors Committee were announced this summer, she was out - or "disinvited" as she puts it. The undoubted hurt caused by this omission made it "a difficult time" for, before it, she had become chairwoman of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, a voluntary, non government organisation. Her gaze hasn't wavered.

Her motivation clearly stems from something a great deal deeper than ill considered sympathy for thugs and muggers. Poverty and crime, she passionately believes, are inextricably entwined. "One of the first, most frightening things you notice as you go through the prison wings is that poverty has a colour, an awful kind of yellow grey colour". And no, she insists, it is not the colour of drug users (who comprise around 60 per cent of the prison population). "It is crass poverty and comes from five areas of Dublin and that is the population of Mountjoy. And it is something that the political process - and I mean previous governments as well - is refusing to acknowledge. Until such time as the political process recognises that poverty is an important factor, then you're going to have a situation as complicated and as difficult as it is today. The political process as a whole has turned its back on the whole issue so no party has earned the right to make these incredible moral judgments that we're hearing in recent days. When you think of it, Fianna Fail has been in power for longer than anyone else. It's a historical problem, a problem of neglect, and now we're seeing the last straw breaking the camel's back. Things, regrettably, had to explode at some stage".

There has been a lot of comment in recent days, she says, about the "humane" system: "But it's only humane because of the individual personalities of the officers who consistently are building up and maintaining trust wish the prisoners against all odds. A system which locks up men for on average, 14 to 16 hours a day, and women for 14, is not humane. A system which deprives people of the constitutional right to basic education - and I mean just reading and writing - is not humane. A system which deprives people of their constitutional right to adequate medical attention is not humane. A system which has a disproportionately high rate of suicide, particularly among remand prisoners, is not humane. A system where mentally unstable people cannot get adequate psychiatric help and who as a consequence of this mental instability end up in padded cells is not humane. A system where slopping out exists as the norm is by no standard humane.

"To me, there is a mistaken perception of what the word `liberal' means in prison terms. For example, we in the Irish Penal Reform Trust will never label people as `thugs' because I firmly believe - as Governor John Lonergan has said - that if you treat men like dogs, they will act like dogs. It's a simple philosophy but it's true. After all, what officers and everyone else should realise is that if you achieve a humane prison, then you are automatically talking about better working conditions for officers. I have always said that Mountjoy is a terrible place to live in, but that it is a really difficult place to work in."

IN ANY event, she believes that if the criminal profile of those who end up in Mountjoy were to develop a middle class tinge, those who hurl the word "liberal" as an epithet might have to change tack in a hurry.

"Imagine if all those important public figures who had to avail of the tax amnesty were treated like the poor and ended up in Mountjoy? Imagine how they would feel about one shower a week, or the queue to slop out. Modern living? If you call having a small radio that has to run on batteries modern living, well fine, that's modern living. But imagine how the rich would react to that notion of modern living. The rich are used to having a voice, but the poor are silent. And, as Joe Costelloe has said, there are no votes in prisons."

The most tragic aspect of a punitive policy in the prisons, she believes, is that it actually increases crime by helping to build up resentment, leading to violence among prisoners as well as towards staff. "The only way you can break the cycle of violence is when you are in a controlled situation in prison, and you give the prisoners programmes that will help them, over and over again, to take responsibility for their own lives. Members of an English voluntary group called RAPT have been allowed into some prisons there and, by following a highly structured programme involving a lot of time and a lot of labour, have reduced drug taking from over 70 per cent to 13 per cent."

To her, these ideas are almost childishly obvious, yet there is nothing high handed or arrogant about the way she expresses them. She went back to college at the age of 39 to study social science, followed by a Masters in unemployment. She has just completed a PhD in "what the Irish really mean by equality and democracy". Her views have been shaped, not only by academic and practical studies, but by the experience of living in other countries.

What shot into focus on her return was the culture of secrecy that pervaded much of Irish life, a culture that extended into the prison system when she joined the Mountjoy Visitors Committee in 1993. Things are changing for the better, she says, "but there exists within the prison system a culture of acquiescence. In other words, those who do not want certain things to be said put pressure on those who want to say things and those whose job it has been to say things - the history of the Visiting Committees on the whole has not been good, for example - they have not been the critical voices they should have been."

This had led to "farcical" situations, she says, such as the lack of accountability within the service: "By that I mean, for example, that Governor Lonergan has no power to fire staff he does not think are suitable. The medical director hasn't the power to even constructively reprimand staff that are not spending enough time in the prison or whatever."

She notes that the committee formed by the Department of Justice to consider the composition of the new Prisons Board contains no governor or prison practitioner. Groups who have done massive amounts of research on rehabilitative programmes - such as the Penal Reform Trust have had to ask to be invited to make submissions.

Is she optimistic that the Department will take their submissions on board? "I have to be optimistic", she says carefully. "I think that the present prison situation is such that it will be easier for us to arrange meetings with the Department of Justice".

IT IS hard to believe that Valerie Bresnihan has been involved in agitation for penal reform for only three years. Propelled by passion, exasperation and buoyed up by facts, she will talk incessantly about it. But anyone seeking some insights into her personal journey to this point will have a tougher job. She abhors the notion of personal publicity or of achieving celebrity "on the back of a cause" and is reluctant even to say how many children she has. Under pressure, she finally admits to being a Corkwoman and recipient of a "privileged and comfortable upbringing" as the daughter of Aubrey Thompson, an engineer, and May, garage owners from Mallow and "huge" Fine Gael supporters. After boarding school at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, Valerie was initially bound for a career in radiography, which she failed "beautifully", before going on to teach mentally retarded children. Around this time, she met and married Barry Bresnihan (a fixture on the international rugby scene until the early 19705), and probably picked up a number of her obvious survival skills during the first 10 years of marriage, which involved 13 moves between three countries and the production of four children, all either working now or at college (without a medical doctor or rugby player among them). The Bresnihans eventually settled in Dublin 4 and aside from occasional forays into the public eye, such as when she founded the Eczema Society of Ireland and her ultimate return to UCD, Valerie devoted herself full time to her children.

She always had a deep interest in politics and "liked the sounds that the Labour Party were making so much about equality" that she became a member in 1992. She remains tight lipped about their performance in government, and will only say that she was "very unhappy about the position they and other politicians who had a reputation for caring about prison systems" took on the bail issue. "Again, it's back to the old thing about being silent".

Meanwhile, she runs three or four miles around Belfield three times a week, does yoga classes, is an enthusiastic member of a local book club and treks up mountains with her husband during holidays. She also considers vegetating to be an essential part of living. This she does in front of the television watching The Simpsons.