THE HEAD of the Irish Prison Service, Michael Donnellan, has rejected claims that criminal gangs are now more powerful than ever in Irish jails, saying it was his agency and its staff that controlled prisons and not criminal gangs.
“We will not allow any prisoner to dominate our environment,” he said.
“We are in charge of our environment. We will run that safely without fear or without favour. Gangs will not rule our prisons.”
Mr Donnellan, a former head of the Probation Service who has recently taken over as director general of the prison service, made his comments at the annual conference of the Prison Officers’ Association in Galway.
He was reacting to claims by the association’s president Stephen Delaney that gangs now controlled some parts of the prison system.
Mr Donnellan said gangs who were active in the community now had smaller sub-groups, or factions, locked up in jails. These continued to operate together as a faction and did not leave their criminal tendencies “at the gates” of jails. However, he said the prison service had a wide range of options to cope with the factions.
“We have a senior management group that meets with all the governors of the closed prisons that risk-assesses these gangland people. We have strategies then about how we move them, house them, manage them and separate them.
“We also have the operational support unit which has airport-style security. We have passive and active dogs in relation to [searching for] drugs and phones. And then we have intelligence gathering from our own internal security staff.” He said prison staff also liaised closely with gardaí about serious criminals in the prison system and insisted the prison service did not tolerate or turn a blind eye to gang-based intimidation or bullying.
“We are more on top of this issue now than ever, in my belief. We build on the experience of the last decade.”
While there were 22 criminal factions in Wheatfield Prison and 18 in Mountjoy Prison – both in Dublin – he believed prison staff worked very well on a daily basis to keep these groups separated and to control them.
“Our strategy is to break these groups down and return them to normalised regimes. When they are in these factions little or nothing can be done that’s effective to their rehabilitation.”
Mr Delaney said his members believe a much more organised approach needed to be taken to gang violence.
The association also accused some prison governors of taking a “soft” approach to jailed criminals who attack officers in jails.
The claim was made after the release of figures from the Irish Prison Service which revealed there have been almost 300 attacks by prisoners on officers in the past two years.
Last year there were 141 attacks on officers and in 2010 there were 149 such incidents. The number of attacks by prisoners on other prisoners is now exceeding 1,000.
POA general secretary John Clinton said the approach of some governors to attacks on prison officers was not firm enough and that even in cases where prisoners were investigated, the sanctions were not sufficient. “There should be a zero tolerance on this from the authorities,” he told the conference.
“There must be a clear message that for poorly behaved prisoners, the full rigour of the system will come down upon them.” In the latest incident, a prison officer in Cloverhill Prison on Wednesday was slashed with a razor on the hands and face. In the same jail last Sunday another prison officer was beaten in an office.
