——recently released from a penal institution. We are all familiar with the volume which sometimes appears over the name of a recently released prisoner, the contents of which are manifestly distorted by the sense of bitterness and resentment that one who suffered imprisonment is likely to experience. This book, to which we shall attach no more importance than is its due, makes a claim upon our attention, in my opinion, because of the moderation of its language and because of the wise and generous tribute that is paid to the governor of the prison in which this prisoner spent his period of detention, the tribute he pays to the chief officer and the tribute he pays to the humanity, general decency, and kindness of the prison officers.
I find that usually, if you read a story by a prisoner, it includes violent animadversions on those into whose custody the writer was delivered. This story, from which I shall quote, is marked by the fact that it testifies rather to the kindness and humanity not only of the governor but of almost all the officers with whom he was brought in contact. I am not asking the House to accept the quotations I give as anything approaching gospel, but I think they are a necessary antidote to the phrase employed by the Minister: "Prisoners receive more substantial meals of better quality". I have no doubt the Minister believes that.
I should like to give the House now an impression of how those meals appear to the men who have to eat them. One of them has it to say, at any rate, that the food is poor, inadequate and monotonous:
The food a prisoner gets is limited to white bread, potatoes, cabbage, onions, tea, margarine, a morsel of beef or mutton, an infinitesimal portion of jam, the concoction called "broth", and on Fridays one pint of milk and two ozs. of bread and ¾ oz. of margarine.
The tea ration supplied at 4.30 is the same as that supplied at breakfast. For supper at 7.30 p.m. another pint of tea, four ozs. of bread with a little jam.
There are four different kinds of dinner during the week. On Mondays and Wednesdays it is Irish Stew and 2 ozs. of bread. What is called "Irish Stew" is not Irish Stew. The dietary says mutton uncooked 8 ozs., potatoes 20 ozs., onion or carrot 2 ozs., and flour 2 ozs. These ingredients are put in one 30 gallon pot and boiled together. The potatoes weigh about 20 stone. Six stone of mutton, cut in small pieces, is put in with the potatoes. The mutton had always much more fat than lean in it and the fat was that woolly kind of suet that caused nausea when it touched a tender palate... Two stone of carrots or onions and two stone of flour are added. The "Irish Stew" that resulted was a sodden mass of fat, flour and potatoes. The onions or carrots gave little flavour to the mush. As the stew cooled it congealed and became an uneatable and objectionable looking mess. Quite a lot of it was left uneaten by the hungry prisoners and found its way as swill to the pighouse... On Tuesdays and Saturdays the dietary consisted of 16 ozs. of cabbage, or other vegetables, four ozs. and bread 4 ozs... The meat came in miscellaneous pieces and was boiled the day before, just as it arrived, untrimmed, uncleaned, unblanched, in one of the 30 gallon pots. The meat was taken out when boiled and the water was left in the pot overnight. On the following day some left-over stirabout, flour and onions were added and the whole re-boiled. This was the broth. It was served from a milk can of the usual kind, with broad base and narrow mouth, by a prisoner using a pint milk measure. Naturally it spilled against the narrow mouth of the milk can and soiled the server's shirt, coat-sleeves or bare arms...
The dinner dietary on Thursday and Sundays was corned beef (uncooked 8 ozs.), cabbage 4 ozs., potatoes 16 ozs. and bread 4 ozs.
In this case also the meat was cooked on the day before use.
On Fridays the dinner dietary was rice 2 ozs., dry bread 8 ozs., and a pint of milk. As an alternative the doctor might allow a prisoner to get vegetable soup and 20 ozs. of potatoes instead of the rice and milk.
The only vegetable was cabbage and I may interpolate that cabbage is a very good vegetable.
The quotation continues:
When it was unobtainable, a desert-spoonful of boiled onion mush or similar quantity of mashed parsnips, turnips or carrots was substituted for it. The cabbage for about 250 was packed in cold water in one of the 30 gallon pots at 7 a.m., brought to the boil quickly and boiled continuously until sometime after 10 a.m. It was then taken out of the pot, chopped on a wooden tray and put on plates with a tiny meat ration. The plates of cabbage and cold meat were stacked, one on top of the other, in such a way that the bottom of one plate was bedded down on the cabbage and meat on the plate underneath it. All the plates so stacked were then placed on a tin or aluminium tray which was set on top of one of the 30 gallon pots containing boiling water from which the steam was rising. The tray and the plates on it were then covered with a sheet and in this crude way an effort was unsuccessfully made to heat up the dinners before they were served at 12.30. By dinner time the cabbage was dark, cold, smelly and unhealthy looking and could have had no value whatever. At dinner time the potatoes in their jackets were put on top of the cabbage and meat on the plates and in this way the prisoner got his dinner.
Many of the enamel plates on which the dinners are served were often damaged... Sometimes they leaked as a result of rust eating through the metal where the enamel had chipped or broken off. The washing of the plates is carried out in accordance with the routine approved by the Minister. The forty to forty-five plates for a class are collected by the prisoner who is class orderly and are, with the knives and forks, put into a bucket of warm water and washed without soap or other detergent. They are then dried with cloths, better not described.
This prisoner goes on to say:
The only cooking facilities provided in the prison kitchen are four 30-gallon pots, one 40-gallon pot and a steamer for the potatoes. Everything, except the potatoes on four days a week, has to be boiled in those five pots.... The 40-gallon pot is used for making tea. Of the remaining four, one is for stirabout, one for the cabbage, one for boiling meat, rice, broth or stew and one for hot water.
I do not ask the House to accept that as a foolproof description of prison diet. That is a view of the prison diet from the viewpoint of a man who had to consume it day in and day out for more than two years and who, evidently, came from a background where unpalatable food would not have been his ordinary diet. On the other hand, it is the impression created on a man who experienced that over two years, not coming from a background of extravagant luxury where plain and common food would constitute an intolerable burden. I offer it to the House merely as a comment on the phrase that "a number of improvements in prison conditions have been effected by administrative action". I am quoting from the Minister's statement which says "prisoners receive more substantial meals of better quality".
I remember years ago visiting a county home in Roscommon in which some of my own neighbours were living. I was then a member of the board of health and I remember being greatly shocked to see these people being asked to eat their daily meals off chipped enamel plates. I do not think it had occurred to anybody what a humiliation that was to them and what a daily hardship it was. It had been going on for the previous 70 years and nobody had ever thought to change it, but I must say that the moment I drew it to the attention of my colleagues on the board of health, all the enamel plates were thrown away and we were able to substitute plain china and plain delph. The difference that made to people who had to take their meals day after day in the conditions of the old county home was very great.
Today we are living in an era in which unbreakable crockery is readily available; yet prisoners are still continuing to eat off chipped enamel plates in Mountjoy Jail just because nobody has ever said anything about it. Why not throw the whole lot out and get unbreakable plastic crockery and let these people have their meals in conditions which do not constitute a daily hardship on them?
This is a little pamphlet to which I do not want to attach too much importance. I simply offer it as a recent impression of a prisoner. It is not extravagantly written. It does not seek to make the case that everybody in Mountjoy is a highly cultivated person suffering under intolerable conditions. It readily recognises that the handling of prisoners in Mountjoy becomes an extremely difficult problem because many of them are of the most difficult kind, which this prisoner has no hesitation in stating can be classified as first offenders, frequent offenders, habitual offenders, "moochers", those decrepit old beggars one sees from time to time all over the country, winers — more properly described as chronic alcoholics —"knackers", being the tough type of itinerant tinker, and sexual offenders of one kind or another.
These also have to be sub-divided into youthful offenders and adult offenders and the Minister is to be congratulated on recognising that some measure of segregation, particularly in respect of young persons at first committal on remand, was necessary and is taking powers to give effect to that desirable end. But allowing for the fact that the type of prisoner ordinarily incarcerated in our prisons is of a very mixed type, I do not think it is an extravagant claim, (1), that we should substitute more suitable crockery than chipped enamel and, (2), that you are not providing "more substantial meals of better quality," to quote the Minister's statement, simply by stipulating that there must be so much meat, so much vegetables, so much raw materials. No matter how much raw meat and vegetables there are, a meal is not a meal until it has been cooked and put before the person who has to eat it.
Nobody, no reasonable person, expects that meals served in a penal institution will approximate to those served in one's home or in a restaurant, but I do think they ought to reach a certain standard of decency and that, in addition to the ordinary pains and penalties of detention, those of our neighbours who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in prison should not be asked to accept their food in conditions which I shall describe as sordid but which much more poetical language might pardonably be used to describe. I am trying to soft-pedal this. I could tear passion to tatters about the conditions in which these people get their food. However, I do not think that is necessary because I do not believe the Minister and I are in substantial difference about these matters. For that reason, I am going to say the extracts I am reading are not guaranteed to be absolutely objective and clear, but I believe they present an aspect of this question to which the Minister's attention should be directed so that what is remiss can be put right.
The Minister goes on to say in his statement that prisoners are permitted cigarettes and tobacco at particular times of the day and in Portlaoise prison, where long-term prisoners are housed, the cigarettes and tobacco are supplied at State expense. I think they are allowed six cigarettes a day at the State's expense in Portlaoise. I think that is a humanitarian and sensible arrangement because sometimes we may forget that, in a desire to relax conditions of prisoners, we rightly concede permission to smoke. But some of us have, perhaps, overlooked the fact that that may make the suffering of those who cannot afford to smoke far greater.
If, as I understand, the rule permits four cigarettes a day to the inmates of Mountjoy, I do suggest that we should either adopt the Portlaoise procedure in Mountjoy and give to those who want them the four cigarettes they are permitted to smoke and particularly to give to the old people who are broken down, the old alcoholics, the winers, the tramps, the bit of tobacco the rules permit them to use — if they cannot afford it themselves, then at the State's expense— so that they may not be driven to the extremity of scrambling around the exercise yard trying to pick up the exiguous "butts" that their more fortunate neighbours in misfortune may reject after they have smoked as far as they can.
I do not doubt that recommendations of that kind will find a sympathethic reaction with the Minister. I doubt if his mind has turned to it heretofore. I understand that in our prisons the maximum a prisoner can earn by his work is a penny a day. I understand that that figure has remained the same for decades, if not for generations, whereas in the British prisons it has been expanded to four pence or five pence per day. That is not a very princely sum but even if they were allowed to earn four pence or five pence per day that would provide one solution of this tobacco problem because they would at least have that pocket money which they could spend on the enjoyment of the concession we have already decided to make and which the Minister in his statement says has, on the whole, contributed to a better discipline in our penal institutions than was the rule when that kind of concession was denied in the past.
I am sure the Minister believes this when he says it:
As is well known, too, no doubt, the prison garb of former days has been changed for the better and it is the practice, in the generality of cases, to allow prisoners to wear their own clothes.
I should like to draw the attention of the House to how that appears to a prisoner:
If the sentence does not exceed two years, a prisoner may be allowed to wear his own clothes provided the Governor is satisfied he will get replacements when necessary and a weekly change of shirts, socks, underclothing, collars, ties and handkerchiefs. Prisoners whose sentences are six months or more are issued with a new outfit of prison clothes and boots, but if the sentence is less than six months a prisoner, by order of the Minister for Justice, is issued with used clothing, boots, socks and shirts. The majority of the prisoners are short-term and consequently are dressed in old worn clothes and boots. The old clothing is often stained, torn, dirty, ill-fitting and trampish looking.
May I interpolate here my reaction to that phrase? That last adjective struck a sympathetic chord in me: "and trampish looking". It is bad enough to find yourself planted in Mountjoy for a month or so. Remember it might happen to any of us. That is a thing I think legislators often forget — that it might happen to any of us. But to be turned into a tramp by the raiment which one is constrained to wear is an indignity which I do not believe any of us think it is expedient to employ as a punitive procedure. So, I return to the quotation:
It is not unusual to see newly-admitted short-term prisoners with torn trousers, either too small or too large, and without buttons on the fork.
Some prisoners have half-mast trousers and others have them rolled up at the bottoms to prevent them dragging on the ground.
I cannot help feeling that there is something almost laughable until the tragic aspect of it strikes me. It is something I do not think any of us desire. In addition to exacting the penalty due to society for wrong-doing, none of us wants to make a person in misfortune a figure of fun. I have not the slightest doubt that, in so far as this is appearing to happen, it is inadvertence; and inasmuch as this little pamphlet directs our attention to these considerations, I think it has a value.
The boots issued to short-term prisoners are often derelict and of different sizes. Many of them, through being worn by prisoners for whom they were much too big, have an arabic turn up at the toes.
That is, after all, a very eloquent way of painting a picture which it is hard to see unless you have been a daily witness of it.
The used shirts issued are sometimes buttonless, torn and ill-fitting and now and again one may see a prisoner's belly and chest bare from the navel to the throat. The old used suits are not cleaned before re-issue. One suit of clothes may be issued in turn to several prisoners, and it continues to be issued until it falls to pieces. When prisoners are congregated together for Divine Service or for some other purpose, one may get a nauseating smell from those old clothes. For reasons of Ministerial economy, no polish, dubbin or grease is issued for boots, and prison boots are never polished, dubbed or greased during their years of use.
That is the other side of the story which the Minister told us when he said that the prison garb of former years had been changed for the better and that it is the practice in the generality of cases to allow prisoners to wear their own clothes.
Let us remember in this context again that a great number of these recidivists who go to Mountjoy again and again are tramps. Many of them are alcoholics and the most unfortunate elements in our society but one of the purposes we ought to have in mind when they come to prison is to rescue them in so far as we can, and that may not be very far, from the state of dereliction into which they have fallen. Thus to attire them does not seem to me to contribute to that end.
I am fully conscious of the danger of an excessive reforming zeal in advocating uniforms instead of ordinary clothing. That, I believe, would be a mistake but where ordinary clothing cannot be used, owing to the circumstances of the prisoner or the prison, then I imagine something more seemly than what is here described could be devised — whether by way of overalls or less heavily worn clothing than they are at present using, I am not prepared to say, but clearly it seems that the practice here described requires sympathetic review.
Here is a detail which I feel sure has not been present in the Minister's mind and I do not think I am being unreasonably solicitous when I refer to it, though the Minister is cautious to say on pages 4 and 5:
I am not against change if change would serve a sufficiently useful purpose but in prison administration there is constant pressure from well-intentioned persons to do this or that for the sake of change itself without advertence to the cost.
I suppose I fall within the category of "well-intentioned persons". I suppose that is true but, nevertheless, "well-intentioned persons", foolish as they may seem to bureaucratic ears, on occasions are often the source of modest reform. Here is a suggestion that will not cost the State anything more than they are at present spending and so at least the argument of cost will not be advanced against it. I quote:
When a prisoner is admitted, he is not issued with soap or toothbrush. If his sentence is more than three months he may, with the sanction of the prison doctor, be issued with a toothbrush. He is permitted to shave twice a week and goes around for the rest of the week unshaven.
I think this ex-prisoner is justified in saying this helps to break his morale. I continue to quote:
If prisoners were permitted to shave every day it would help towards rehabilitation.
I think he is right. I think it would be a good thing if special permission were provided to require prisoners to shave every day. I think this prisoner or ex-prisoner is right in saying it is a bad thing to prescribe that they may shave only twice a week. It undoubtedly operates to lower the morale and hustle the prisoners into the acceptance of the status of tramps.
Here is a detail which I think the Minister may profitably bear in mind:
Shirts, socks, towels, sheets and pillow cases come back from the laundry in the female prison very poorly laundered due to out-of-date facilities and inadequate requisites. A prisoner does not get back his own shirt, sheets, socks, towel or pillow case. He just gets an outfit in the pillow case. The shirt that comes back to him may be too big or too small and the socks may be odd ones, non-fitting or badly holed.
I think that is a detail that ought to be remediable and the Minister should provide the means of setting to rights what is there complained of.
I should have thought that the prison hospital, while not being a luxury nursing home, should be a place where special care and kindness would be shown. The inmates of prisons are extremely skilful in dissembling sickness, if they think that thereby they may purchase a soft time for themselves, but experienced prison officers are usually well able to detect that kind of fraud and correct it. We should not, however, consent to a situation in which the really sick in prison are hardly treated in order to deter the malingerer from seeking admission to the hospital. It seems hard that a situation can obtain in which:
The Prison Hospital is detached from the main building but well within the outer walls. Starved of funds for modernisation it is a frowsy dump. Prisoners who are ill, winers suffering from the effects of alcohol poisoned systems, old, infirm moochers, dangerous simpletons, half-wits and lunatics are often to be found in the hospital as patients. Discipline in the hospital is rigid and more severe than in the prison proper and all patients are locked up there in their individual and austerely furnished cells for longer hours than prisoners are locked up in the prison. No experienced prisoner will go into the prison hospital if he can possibly keep out of it. The prison medical officer visits the hospital once daily, and oftener if necessary, but he has nothing much, if anything, to do with the discipline, routine and administration of the hospital. The prison officers attend to these matters. The patients who are able to walk spend part of the forenoon and afternoon and part of the evening in summer walking in the recreation yard or sitting on the concrete surround.
It is perfectly true that precautions must be taken against malingerers seeking to escape the ordinary prison routine by wangling their way into hospital but I do not think that any of us wish a situation to obtain in which the truly sick resist removal to the prison hospital because they fear its rigours. To set that right and to maintain an even balance between solicitude for the sick and an absence of discipline is not impossible, but I think there must be scope for some improvement there. I do not doubt that some improvement could be provided if better facilities were made available to the prison staff for the handling of sick.
Baths are allowed to hospital patients once a fortnight, as against once a week in the main prison. No bath towel is issued to the prisoners who have to dry themselves with their soiled sheets. The baths are, therefore, given on sheet changing day... No bath in the hospital, or for that matter in the main prison, has a stopper in it. A filthy rag has to be used as a stopper. It collects germs and dirt from one patient's bath and floats them into the bath water being used by the next patient.
That is a very small detail but it seems a hardship that patients in the hospital may have a bath only once a fortnight and that, when they do get one, there cannot be an adequate stopper provided for the bath. Yet the daily or fortnightly recurrence of circumstances of that kind makes the life of a prisoner harder than it ought to be.
When the Minister came to refer to the Question of classification he said:
What are the possibilities of introducing further and large-scale reforms? Any consideration of this question must take into account the smallness of our prison population — inclusive of all classes, whether prisoners on remand, awaiting trial, debtors and contempt of court prisoners and those under sentences, the average is about 400 — the fact that there are now only four prisons for the detention of offenders, the high proportion of short-term sentences — 60 per cent of the sentences are for periods of under three months — and the expense of providing additional institutions in relation to the use likely to be made of them and the other demands on our resources. These factors combine to make it impracticable to carry out classification and segregation of prisoners to any great extent.
That is almost exasperating.
Every other country in Europe is wrestling with the appalling problem that its prisons are overcrowded and that they have not got accommodation to carry out the segregation which everybody considers necessary. Here our complaint is that we have not enough prisoners to segregate them. Surely, the ingenuity of man should be able to deal with the problem of adequate segregation when, in fact, the total number of prisoners is not sufficient to tax much more than one-half the capacity of our existing criminal institutions. I am glad to see, as I understand it under this Bill, that the Minister is taking power to ensure that young prisoners who are on remand will not be brought into intimate contact with the habitual prison population. I feel that a very much better type of segregation should be both desirable and possible.
I ask Deputies this question: supposing a young fellow goes out, is wild and commits a serious motoring offence as a result of which he gets a month in jail, does anybody in this House think that on being committed to jail he should be brought into intimate contact with people who are recidivists or convicted of grave moral delinquency? I do not want to over-paint this picture or to make an unreasonable case but my mind always goes back to the bad old days when I first visited Summerhill, that is thirty years ago, and the appalling shock it was to me to find in one room 15 or 20 children. The youngest of those children was little more than two years of age and was in the process of transfer to an industrial school as an orphan. The oldest was a boy of 15 who was on remand for committing a sexual offence against a little girl. That absence of segregation, because they were children in every age group between the little girl and the oldest boy, so shocked me that I pressed successive Ministers very strongly that something was urgently required to be done. I believe something has now been done and there is more effective segregation than in the bad old days.
I am thinking now of a young boy or, worse still, a young girl, although the situation does not arise with girls because as a rule courts do not send a girl to prison. Take a young person who gets into trouble and for whom there is no alternative but to give him a term in jail, if he has been cautioned two or three times and manifestly is going to continue on his course of conduct. He gets say one month in jail. How can it be desirable that that young person should be brought into contact with the other type of prisoners who habituate a penal institution like Mountjoy and who are manifestly quite unsuitable as company for a reckless youth, whom all of us are concerned not alone to check but to redeem? I refer not only to those categories of persons who have been guilty of grave moral delinquency but any decent citizen who gets into trouble which brings him into jail. He has had enough woe surely without equating him in jail with tramps, winers, and "knackers" and all the flotsam and jetsam of prison life with which ordinarily he would have no common contact and with which for his own salvation he should never be identified either in his own mind or in the minds of those into whose care he has been committed when he is sent to jail.
I think there should be segregation. I recognise that to delineate the classes into which prisoners should be segregated presents a problem but it is a problem that should be faced and if possible resolved. Although we may not be able to achieve perfection, we can certainly make real progress on the situation as it obtains today. I am amazed that the Minister for Justice should, in extenuation of his failure to do so, plead that he has so few prisoners to handle. He is in a more fortunate position than those Ministers for Justice in other countries who are driven to the extremity of incarcerating three prisoners in a cell designed for one because they have nowhere else to put them on account of the excessive numbers with which they have to deal.
I congratulate the Minister on his success, with the assistance of his Grace, the Archbishop of Dublin, in securing suitable accommodation for girls whom it is necessary to remand until contact is made with their families, in order to determine how they are to be ultimately disposed of. I gather they are to be placed in the charge of nuns where they are Catholics, and that the Minister has approached other religious communities to provide analogous accommodation for girls of another faith, if circumstances should require them to do so.
I do not suppose there is any particular reason why the word "Borstal" should be retained, and if it is thought desirable to drop it, well and good, but I do not think we are facing this whole problem of what used to be called Borstal in a realistic way. I think there is only one justification for sending any boy to Borstal. Remember we are dealing with boys under 21 years of age. Would the Minister remind me — must not a boy be under 21 years of age to go to Borstal?
