The organised riot last weekend in Mountjoy, which left five men in hospital, could be a taste of what lies ahead as stringent measures to limit the jail's drug supply are rolled out, writes Conor Lally, Crime Correspondent.
AROUND TEATIME last Saturday prison officers on duty in Dublin's Mountjoy jail donned riot gear and stormed the recreational section of D wing. The ensuing confrontation left five men in hospital. One of the injured was a prison officer whose nose and teeth were destroyed when he was smashed in the face with a fire extinguisher.
Some 77 inmates had been running amok for just over two hours by the time the prison's riot squad (control and restraint team) was deployed.
The prisoners had fired snooker balls at five staff on duty forcing them to flee just before 4pm. Once the inmates had taken control of the area the real mayhem started.
They used snooker tables, chairs, tables and anything else they could find to barricade themselves in.
They gained access to adjoining workshops and used the tools they found there to smash up toilets, workshops and the recreational area.
When efforts by prison officers to talk them around failed, a 56-strong team of prison officers in riot gear charged in. After 40 minutes of chaos, and with the rest of the jail on lockdown, order was restored.
Some of the prison officers inhaled chemicals from fire extinguishers set off by inmates, necessitating medical treatment.
The Prison Officers' Association (POA) was quick to cite overcrowding.
General secretary John Clinton said his association had warned the Irish Prison Service just days before the riot that overcrowding was acute and was about to lead to violence.
Mr Clinton conceded new searches of visitors to the jail had reduced the availability of illegal drugs in Mountjoy and that resultant tensions had contributed to last week's disturbance.
THE IRISH PRISON SERVICE was adamant that the riot had been caused by a lack of drugs. Its officials said the violence, while unacceptable and unwelcome, was proof the drug-free regime is starting to work.
The POA's claims that the jails are overcrowded are absolutely true. Mountjoy regularly houses around 600 inmates despite having an original bed capacity for 420. In Cork Prison the situation is even worse.
Reliable prison officer sources have long said inmates with lengthy portions of their sentences still to run are being freed to make room for new committals. In a recent reply to a written Dáil question, the Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern confirmed a planned system of early releases existed in Cork.
For its part, the prison service points to the construction of the new super prison at Thornton Hall, north county Dublin, and extensions to existing jails as the answer to overcrowding.
In the case of the Mountjoy riot, the Irish Prison Service is almost certainly right in claiming a lack of drugs sparked the violence.
The idea of a drug-free prison regime was mooted by the former Minister for Justice Michael McDowell four years ago. It is only now that measures aimed at limiting the supply of drugs are being rolled out.
Mountjoy has, by far, the worst drugs problem in the prison system.
Apart from the chronic problem of drug- smuggling into the jail, most of the prisoners are heroin addicts, with around 400 receiving methadone at the prison at any one time. Those figures mean the jail is the biggest methadone clinic in the country.
Any success in limiting the flow of drugs into that kind of environment was always likely to cause unrest.
Drugs enter the prison system in a variety of ways. Some are internally concealed by newly- committed inmates, or those returning from day release for training and periods of temporary release.
Even if the inmates are not drug users they are warned by more violent inmates that they will be beaten unless they bring drugs with them on their return from periods of release.
The prison service is now working to combat internal concealment by introducing chairs on which inmates are asked to sit so their anal area can be X-rayed for hidden contraband.
Other consignments are thrown over the walls into exercise yards. The prisoners receiving the drugs organise to be texted on a smuggled mobile phone when the "delivery" is about to take place. The annual reports of prison visiting committees have documented a desperate picture of inmates in exercise yards rushing for drugs when parcels are thrown over the walls.
The prison service has erected better quality netting over yards in a bid to stop the practice. Gardaí have increased patrols around jail perimeter walls and some people caught throwing parcels over have been arrested and charged.
In a small number of cases, prison officers have been caught supplying drugs to inmates. A number of them have been convicted in recent years, with one Mountjoy prison officer this week charged with drug- and phone-smuggling.
The issue of visitors passing drugs to inmates has been a major concern for many years. In that regard, some prisoners are now only being allowed visits from behind screens, making physical contact impossible.
Searches for visitors have also recently been introduced, during which sniffer dogs are used to find well-concealed drugs. Any visitor found with drugs is removed from a list of pre-approved visitors.
Soon, all visitors and staff will pass through airport-style X-ray security. The sniffer dog team will number 31 handlers when at full strength.
INSIDE JAILS small cameras are being introduced, enabling prison officers to search in difficult-to-reach wall cavities and other ingenious hiding places.
On the treatment side, the Irish Prison Service has awarded a contract for 1,000 hours per week of addiction counselling to Dublin's Merchants Quay Project. Additional nurse officers have been recruited, as have prison officers, to man dedicated drug treatment teams.
Recently, The Irish Times revealed there had been almost 40,000 positive drugs tests across the 3,200-strong prison population in a three-year period. In some jails 75 per cent of those tested were positive for illegal drugs.
The new efforts to prevent drugs reaching chronically-addicted prisoners, many with a history of extreme violence, need to be complimented by a massive effort on the treatment side.
If not, a large prison population desperate for drugs is guaranteed to regularly engage in the kind of organised disturbance seen in Mountjoy last weekend. Any attempt by staff to confiscate drugs that get past the new security measures is likely to be met with violence. It is a worrying time to be a prison officer.
