The Croppy in the ‘Ville (that's Pentonville)

Regular readers of The Rusty Wire Service (if indeed such esoteric animals exist) will know that gaol is never far from The Deptford Croppy’s mind.

Pete Doherty's North London hideaway

Today in fact, the Croppy, as part of his work with the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas, gave a talk to prison officers and staff in HMP Pentonville on Irish aspects of diversity within the UK prison system.

Pentonville prison has been locking up Londoners for generations. Opened in 1842, it was a revolutionary design for its time, similar to Bentham's Panopticon; using a central, controlling tower with wings radiating off from it. Its architect was Major Joshua Jebb, a Royal Engineer, also designed Mountjoy Gaol in Dublin.

Attitudes to prisoners generally and developing ideas of incarceration would have meant that prison life in the mid 1800s was a brutal and clumsy mixture of extreme physical and psychological hardship. (Maybe Pete Doherty wouldn’t have liked the Ville so much back then...)

The following extract comes from the Surveyor General of Prisons Report on Criminal Prisons in London dated 1862: “The occupants of the cells, following prison discipline developed in America, were forbidden to speak to each other and in exercise tramped in silent rows, wearing brown cloth masks. In chapel, which they had to attend every day, they sat in cubicles, their heads visible to the warder but hidden from each other,”

Just as it is today, insanity (or whatever PC term you prefer to the legal one) was rife in the Victorian prison system. With the Thatcherite stripping out of the mental health service in the 1980s, the problem in prisons has increased exponentially.

Casement: Buried at
the Ville till 1965

Pentonville is also, for all you green flag-wavers, the site of Sir Roger Casement’s execution on 3 August 1916. Casement, like many ‘traitors to the Crown’ was held in the Tower of London which is still technically considered a prison as well as a palace, but Pentonville was his last mortal destination and there his remains stayed until they were taken back to Ireland in 1965 and given a state funeral where half a million people filed past his coffin. He is now buried in the Republican plot at Glasnevin Cemetry in Dublin but Casement’s own wish was to be buried at the Morlough Bay in Antrim.

It was a little disconcerting therefore, to be standing in front of a tricolour and giving a lecture to a room full of gaolers on Irish culture and history as well as a gentle warning to the officers that they needed to take more account of the rights and issues of Irish travellers when they came across them in the prison.

Until very recently, the UK’s National Offender Management Service couldn’t even tell you how many travellers there were in prison in the UK.

Only in the past few months have any real efforts been made to address the issue. The only current research of any empirical nature on the subject has been carried out the by ICPO’s own Travellers in Prison Project.

These figures don’t paint a very encouraging picture. Using a week in September as a data gathering snapshot and information provided by prison staff in Diversity and Chaplaincy departments, the ICPO was able to posit that Irish Travellers made up 0.5% of the prison population in England and Wales.

This doesn’t seem like much until you look at the miniscule figures for the Irish Travelling community as a percentage of the total population. The ICPO suspects that traveller numbers in prison are actually significantly higher but that many travellers won’t declare themselves for fear of discrimination.

Then there are the issues around education and mental health that are particular to travellers. Literacy training in prison almost always assumes some level of competence and this is not something that many travellers (particularly the older ones) will have.

Locking someone up whose life has had few encounters with the institutions of settled society and furthermore, whose life has always been about close family bonds causes a wide spectrum of mental health problems. Problems, that in the prisons’ traveller population, are presenting with higher frequency and greater severity than for many other ethnic groupings. (Also, the general Irish and West Indian male prisoner populations are still over-represented in this regard.)

It's important to remember that no-one is asking for people to be released if they are guilty of a crime, what is being sought however is some understanding and recognition that there have been some pretty grave shortcomings in the past on the part of HM Prison Service, but more than that, people want some positive changes implemented.

Central hall in Pentonville

Pentonville is a bit of a zoo, it’s a holding and dispersal prison which means it receives people from the courts or police stations on remand and they stay there for a period until after conviction while a more permanent destination is arranged.

It means in practice that most people are never there for more than 28 days so opportunities to work with prisoners is extremely limited. Speaking to people in healthcare who actually work for the local NHS trust and not HM Prison Service, it was easy to see that, with the best will in the world, the quality of interventions they were able to make were unavoidably limited.

At the end of the talk, we shared a bowl of Irish stew with the prison officers and even though I had canvassed the room for London Irish officers and had received a fair sprinkling of hands, the only people who came to speak to me were a woman from Zimbabwe; a Jamaican man; and a woman from St Lucia....