Midlands Prison: ‘Even clothes coming in were soaked in psychoactive substances’

On the G wing in the Midlands Prison, the sound of a soccer match on TV spills on to the landings through the cell doors. This is one of two wings in the jail in Portlaoise, Co Laois, that combine to create the biggest sex offenders’ unit in the Irish prison system.

Walking the landings David Conroy, a former aircraft mechanic in the Irish Air Corps turned prison officer and now the governor of this prison, the biggest in the Republic with 875 prisoners, manages a large community – “like any large village” – and a huge workforce.

All life is here: 18-year-olds serving their first sentence, the mentally ill, and the addicted. There is also a growing number of foreign nationals of all religions and cultures, lifers, sexual offenders, petty and serious criminals and elderly inmates who will never taste freedom again.

Far from the clichéd “holiday camp” oft spoken about, life in an Irish prison is stressful and volatile, says Conroy, and prematurely ages the men who make up his client group. But he insists Irish prisons have undergone enormous reform since he started out in the 1990s. On his first day in Mountjoy Prison, after just nine weeks of basic training, the first thing that hit him was the smell.

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[ New palliative care centre to be built on Midlands Prison campus ]

“The place was grossly overcrowded, there was no in-cell sanitation,” he said of the Victorian prison where prisoners urinated and defecated into a bucket overnight before bringing the contents through the prison wings in the morning for disposal. “It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience to see everyone walking past you on their way to slop out,” says Conroy.

He recalls “packed recreation halls full of smoke”, a climate of “aggression” in a “revolving door” prison system with inadequate assessment of prisoners’ suitability for early release to make way for new arrivals every day.

“It was about trying to find your way in those first couple of years as a prison officer and learn that your interpersonal skills are the way you could get more out of people rather than any heavy-handed approach.”

Conroy believes the introduction of televisions into prison cells was a big step forward as it gave prisoners, especially those with poor literacy levels, an outlet when they were “behind the cell door” for long periods of time. When he moved to Wheatfield Prison, also in Dublin, and later to the Midlands Prison, for his first stint, both were new, spacious and modern jails with in-cell sanitation and work and training spaces for prisoners.

Conroy said comparing them to Mountjoy “was like chalk and cheese” and he immediately understood the positive impact suitable and modern facilities had on prisoners – “it’s their home for a long time” – and how it fostered good order on the landings.

The introduction of an incentivised regime a decade ago, he says, has changed the environment across the system. Prisoners can gain one third off their sentence – rather than one quarter which all are automatically guaranteed – by committing to good behaviour and becoming trusted prisoners.

However, Conroy is clearly very concerned about the return of overcrowding to Irish jails and the wrecking ball effect it has on good order and education facilities as well as training and workshops.

In 2012, for example, there were 4,500 prisoners in custody with a further 850 on temporary release, often granted because their beds – or mattresses on the floor – were needed for newly committed inmates. The following year that dropped to just under 4,000 prisoners in Irish jails with about 600 on temporary release. That drop came after years of rising numbers had plunged the system into chaos and violence in inhumane conditions. The decline in the prison population back then was a reflection of crime easing a little from its runaway levels of the Celtic Tiger era. There were also cutbacks in the Garda during austerity, meaning fewer of the crimes that were committed were solved.

Since then, that dynamic has been reversed and the prison population has climbed. By December 2022 there were 4,350 prisoners in the system – up 700 in just two years – with a further 300 on temporary release.

We’re at the point now where consideration needs to be given to policy [providing for] more community-based sentencing and to address overcrowding. It’s not an easy question to answer and really we have to start at a sentencing level.

—  David Conroy

“Tensions rise when prisons are overcrowded,” says Conroy of trying to manage a complex environment populated by many violent men and prison gangs. “If we fill every place and somebody new comes in, what we give them at that stage is a mattress [on the floor].”

He says tensions lead to violence, necessitating the deployment of additional resources – prison officers – into locations and tasks within prisons to better maintain order. This often occurs at the expense of prison schools, workshops and training classes, all of which are cut back or closed completely when overcrowding worsens. This further ramps up tensions.

“It is a reality that if you hire more guards and more judges, if you tighten up bail conditions and bail laws, then [prison] numbers rise,” says Conroy on a day when his 875-berth jail is at capacity, as usual. “So we’re at the point now where consideration needs to be given to policy [providing for] more community-based sentencing and to address overcrowding. It’s not an easy question to answer and really we have to start at a sentencing level.”

One of Conroy’s colleagues – and a member of the governors’ team working under him – Ray O’Keeffe points out 75 per cent of those people committed are sentenced to 12 months or less.

Overcrowding aside, the growing number of elderly prisoners in Irish jails is now becoming a real issue, and one that required “a huge level of resources every day”. During the pandemic – when the prison service, incredibly, kept the virus out of jails, apart from occasional cases, some 43 prisoners in the Midlands had to cocoon as they were aged over 70 years. “Seven or eight of them were severely immunocompromised,” says Conroy, before adding none contracted the virus.

Across the prison system, the number of inmates 50 years or older more than doubled between 2007 and 2018 – from 195 to 439. That number has since continued to climb and now well exceeds 500, though a precise, up-to-date figure was not immediately available. While the most elderly prisoners pose the biggest challenge for prison staff, even those in their 50s at times also need specialist care.

“The healthcare outcomes for someone who is 55 in prison is the same as a 65-year-old or 70-year-old in the community,” says O’Keeffe, adding “the stresses, the different way of living” in jail take their toll. “You end up older younger in prison than you do in the community.”

While it was often said “the best cure for crime is a 30th birthday, that has drifted off in the last couple of years”, O’Keeffe added. It was also clear, he said, that more offenders were now staying active in the criminal world well into their 50s and 60s and even 70s at times – and being sent to prison – just as many in the wider population were continuing in the workplace in their advancing years.

The prisoner population also has generally poorer health than those in the community due to the high percentage of prisoners who are substance abusers or who come from impoverished backgrounds. In the Midlands Prison approximately 90 prisoners at any one time are aged 60 years or older, a new scenario compared to even a decade ago.

For the elderly and frail prisoner population, basic alterations such as hand rails in cells and around toilets and showers have become common in recent years in the midlands. Prison staff have also begun factoring in age when allocating cells. “It comes down to trying to select people who can climb up into bunk beds,” says Conroy.

However, others with conditions such as dementia or who were nearing, or already in, the “end-of-life phase” required specialist healthcare responses, including palliative care. Of the eight deaths in the Midlands Prison in 2022, seven were age-related. Conroy said planning for a palliative care centre on the Midlands Prison campus was well advanced and had been approved, with a construction date awaited.

A lot of these guys [with mental illness] shouldn’t be in prison. When mental health beds are reduced in the community, prison becomes the only option for how the State deals with them

—  David Conroy

Terminally ill prisoners, or those who were close to death due to their age, could still be transferred to a hospital, if treatment would help them, said Conroy. They could also be granted compassionate leave to die at home. However, other prisoners in their final days would be accommodated in the new palliative care centre, especially those who sentencing judges clearly intended should spend all of what remained of their lives in jail for their crimes.

While the prison service is in a position to create a palliative care centre to meet the growing need, Conroy says prisons will never be a place for treating those who were mentally ill. The National Forensic Mental Health Service has previously said almost 30 per cent of male prisoners sentenced in Ireland were mentally ill, increasing to 60 per cent for sentenced women prisoners.

“What we need to do is to get those prisoners to hospital, that’s where they need to go,” says Conroy, adding there were “logjams” when it came to accessing forensic mental health services. “A lot of these guys shouldn’t be in prison. When mental health beds are reduced in the community, prison becomes the only option for how the State deals with them.”

The non-availability of beds at the Central Mental Hospital down the years meant prisoners who were acutely mentally ill had to remain in jail, “adding to a lot of risk in prison”.

Recent reports suggest the new, expanded Central Mental Hospital, which has just opened at Portrane, Co Dublin, would be full for men within just months. However, Conroy said “increased throughput” was now being considered by the Irish Prison Service and other stakeholders. This would amount to a system for sending prisoners to the hospital for short periods, where they could be assessed and treated – including medicated – and then returned to prison. It was hoped these short stints would enable more prisoners to avail of the hospital’s services. He added prisons did not have the capacity to treat and medicate the mentally ill.

Of the 875 prisoners in the Midlands, on the day The Irish Times visited, 535 of them were sex offenders – all segregated from the rest of the prison population because of the likelihood they would be attacked by other inmates.

Both Conroy and O’Keeffe said the sex offenders were generally more educated than those in the general prison population, often came from more stable backgrounds and were much less likely to have addiction issues.

O’Keeffe says the areas where they were housed were “probably very close to being retirement home standard rather than a prison setting” because many of them were aged men convicted years – in some cases decades – after committing the crimes for which they were jailed.

Likewise, many life-sentence prisoners “settled” into the prison regime after a number of years and were often more predictable. While some of the 80 lifers were men who had never been in trouble with the Garda before committing the murder they were jailed for – often murdering their wives or partners – they very quickly got over the “huge shock to the system” of being in jail.

“What I find with those guys is they often begin to engage quicker,” says Conroy. “They stay out of the exercise yards and the non-constructive areas. They’d gravitate more towards school and work training earlier.”

While those lifers and the sex offenders made up such a large part of the Midlands Prison population, and were often more mature and more stable, contraband – smuggled phones and drugs – was still a problem in the jail. When physical visits were cancelled during the pandemic, thus cutting off a popular route for getting drugs into the jail, prisoners and their loved ones proved resourceful.

“The post was being dipped in psychoactive substances,” says Conroy of the letters being sent into prisoners. Staff responded by taking a photocopy of all correspondence and passing the copy to prisoners. “And the second thing was to get new technology to detect the psychoactive substances and then we can go back to issuing the mail,” added Conroy. “But even clothes coming in during the pandemic were soaked in psychoactive substances.

“And before we had our windows replaced, some of them were broken, a few years ago it was drones coming into the prison in the middle of the night for contraband deliveries. That did become a very significant risk factor for a period of time. There was a guy... going to a number of different prisons in the middle of the night and he was doing drone deliveries. You always have to be looking out for these things.”