The Governor of Mountjoy On Society's Contribution to Crime

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday February 27, 2003 21:11 by E. Commins elishacommins at netscape dot net Galway 087-9317233

On March 8th this year John Lonergan will be 35 years in prison. For 20 of those years he has been Governor of Mountjoy, Ireland’s largest prison.

Speaking at NUI, Galway Mr. Lonergan criticised the government’s reactionary focus to crime and pointed out that the recent violence in Limerick city was inevitable saying: ‘You cannot segregate crime and criminality from the rest of society. It’s a very complex issue which links to social and economic circumstances.’

‘It’s no coincidence’, says Lonergan ‘that 75% of the Dublin-born prisoners in Mountjoy come from six tiny pockets in Dublin, all drug-infested, unemployment-infested and all disadvantaged.’

Broader societal issues such as housing have a huge impact according to Mr. Lonergan who condemns the way we have fragmented our urban society by allowing areas to be developed and sustained as ghettos.

Lonergan is also critical of the lack of support services for families in stress and the inflexibility of the education system.

Further damning statistics on Mountjoy include the staggering 25% of prisoners who have a history of in-patient care in a psychiatric hospital. There’s a lot of mental illness in Irish prisons according to Lonergan who says: ‘In no other sector of society would you find this level of mental illness.’

Challenging the perception that everyone in prison is vicious or bad he says ‘there are about 500-600 dangerous people in prison, murderers, rapists and some psychiatric or disturbed prisoners who shouldn’t even be there.’

‘But the rest are good people in many ways’, he says. At the moment the prisoners are doing a huge amount of work for the Special Olympics, making bath-towels and flags for the opening ceremony.

He spoke also of the fund-raising efforts of the prisoners last October when they organised a marathon in the exercise yard. Prisoners receive a 1 euro gratuity per day. From this they raised 1,400 euro from each other for Temple Street Hospital.

Criticising the current rightwing approach in favour of longer, tougher sentences Lonergan says he is ‘a firm believer in keeping people out of prison at all costs. Very few prisoners come out after ten years reasonably ok. In fact, many are very seriously psychologically damaged as a result.’

While we do have to have a prison system for the 500-600 very dangerous people he remains adamant that prison is not a deterrent. ‘For 96-97% of the population the stigmatisation of doing something wrong in the community is a deterrent’, he says. ‘ But for the rest of the population going to prison for some kids is same as going to college for others.’

Contrary to the view of the mass media the law certainly doesn’t favour the criminal. 75% of prisoners in Mountjoy plead guilty. ‘They wouldn’t be doing so if the law was in their favour’, he says.