‘You’d pay a thousand a month for this in Dublin’: Inside the new Limerick Women’s Prison designed for reform not punishment

“I can tell you, it’s better than anything I had in college,” says chief officer Shane Kelly as he stands in a cell in the newly built Limerick Women’s Prison.

The 56 cells, or “rooms” as the staff prefer to call them, have more than a passing resemblance to modern student accommodation.

A small television is playing a morning talkshow. Beside that is a phone that prisoners can use to call the outside world for up to 12 minutes a day. Most importantly for prisoners, each cell has a private, en-suite bathroom and shower area.

“You’d pay a thousand a month for this in Dublin,” one impressed visitor remarks, without much exaggeration.

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And these are just the standard cells. Eight of the units, which Kelly calls the deluxe rooms, are “apartment-style”. They have three rooms- a livingroom/kitchen, bedroom and bathroom – all for one prisoner.

They’re the only cells of their type in the entire system and are designed to prepare long-serving prisoners for life on the outside, Kelly explains.

They can also double up as “mother and baby accommodation”, reflecting the grim fact that occasionally women give birth in custody or shortly before beginning their sentence. Under prison rules, newborns can be kept with mothers for up to 12 months.

In one of the bedrooms is a baby-changing table but since there are no babies currently in Limerick Prison, it is used by its occupant as a shelf for a picture of the Virgin Mary and various knick-knacks.

The walls of common areas are filled with vibrant art produced by local painters. In the education wing, women work out on exercise machines or practice hairdressing on plastic models. All the women turn and wave to the group of visitors, including Minster for Justice Helen McEntee, as they pass by.

Despite these touches of humanity, indications of the facility’s true purpose are there if visitors look close enough. The doors are still made of reinforced steel, the cutlery in the rooms is plastic and there are metal grates on most of the windows.

Outside every cell is a touchpad that can display the occupant’s name, sentence and even their current location. Chief Officer Kelly presses a few buttons on the panel and the frosted glass in the cell door suddenly clears. This allows officers to perform cell checks without the need for cumbersome and noisy viewing panels.

It is a world away from the crumbling E-wing of the men’s prison where women used to be housed. Built in 1821, the wing was constantly overcrowded; on occasion reaching 170 per cent capacity.

As usually happens with these things, criticism will no doubt follow that the new prison, built at a cost of €53 million, is pampering these women instead of punishing them.

It’s a criticism prison management seem ready for. The new prison is the nicest accommodation many of these women have ever experienced, but that is more a reflection on how bleak their lives on the outside have been, says Kelly.

“Eighty or 90 per cent of female prisoners come from an abusive background. They’ve been used and abused and utilised as a commodity. They’ve been forced into the sex trade or used as mules for drugs.”

Unlike other prisons, gang feuding is not much of a problem here, says Kelly, because these women are simply “too low on the food chain” for such activity.

Things like in-cell televisions keep people safe, he says. Prisoners used to be locked up for 12 hours straight or more. Many couldn’t read, meaning there was little to keep them occupied except sleep and dark thoughts. Self-harm and suicide attempts were parts of daily life.

Kelly estimates since televisions were allowed in cells, self-harm has decreased by two-thirds.

These amenities also protect staff and other prisoners. Shared showers and telephones were “flashpoints” for fights between inmates. That has reduced “massively”, he says.

“The punishment is the sentence. We’re not here to be punitive.”

The new prison was completed under-budget and ahead of schedule, the Minister for Justice said. She wants similar facilities rolled out across the entire estate.

But amid all the backslapping on Wednesday, there was a sense that this is only a temporary reprieve for the Irish Prison Service. The new facility is already 92 per cent full while the prison system overall is at 103 per cent capacity.

[ Prisoners sleeping on matresses ‘wedged next to lavatories’ due to overcrowding ]

Promises of more judges and gardaí, along with increasing numbers of short prison terms being handed down, mean this number is sure to rise, even with Government commitments to open 620 new prison beds over the next five years.

The designers of the new prison have at least taken this into account. Despite all the talk of the benefits of single-cell accommodation, each cell in Limerick Women’s Prison has been designed so that another inmate can be moved in at short notice.