‘Embarrassing the State’: The ‘Ordinary’ Prisoner Rights Movement in Ireland, 1972–6

Abstract

This article explores the early years of the campaign for ‘ordinary’, not politically-aligned, prisoners’ rights in Ireland. It argues that this campaign has often been overshadowed by the activities of ‘political prisoners’, who only constituted a small minority of prisoners in the period. The article follows the development and changing tactics of the ordinary prisoners’ movement, through the rise and fall of the Prisoners’ Union (PU) (1972–3) and into the early years of the Prisoners’ Rights Organisation (PRO) (1973–6), which would become the longest-lasting and most vocal penal reform organisation in Ireland, until the formation of the Irish Penal Reform Trust in 1994. It argues that the movement constantly adapted its tactics to address emerging issues and opportunities. Ultimately, it contends that by 1976 the PRO was an increasingly legitimate voice in Ireland’s public discourse on prisons. It shows that, although the campaign did not achieve any major penal reforms in this period, it had a significant impact on public debates about prisons, prisoners’ mental health, the failures of the penal system, and prisoners’ entitlement to human rights.

‘Straightening Crooked Souls’: Psychology and Children in Custody in 1950s and 1960s Ireland*

“…This reflected a more general State inertia in the development of the justice system and penal provision that persisted until the early 1960s and the appointment of Charles Haughey as Minister for Justice in 1961. (Haughey is often depicted as a 'reforming' Minister; Rogan, 2010;Wall, 2020. ) It was also the product of the late development of ancillary child psychiatric and medically run intellectual disability institutions (Kilgannon, 2020;Reid, 2018).…”

Conclusion

“…65 Yet, in 1972 most major prisons did not employ psychiatric staff, though Mountjoy Prison's medical officer was a trained psychiatrist. 66 Prisons remained heavily dependent for psychiatric services on local hospitals as well as the Central Mental Hospital, Dundrum, which was also operating at full capacity. It took until the 1980s for the recommendation of the 1966 Commission of Inquiry to be implemented, and by then prisoners were only accepted at Dundrum as psychiatric facilities outside prison shrank further.…”