17 months of sacrifice – prison life under lockdown

Ruadhán Jones hears about the successes and hardships of lockdown-life in Irish prisons

By international standards, the Irish Prison Service have been very successful in containing Covid. While in the US, infection and death rates in prisons exceeded those of the general population, no deaths were recorded in Irish prisons and few Covid cases.

“They have contained Covid very well, probably better than any other prison system I’ve heard of,” Fr Peter McVerry SJ tells The Irish Catholic. “In America, a huge proportion of prisoners have died of Covid. Here the isolation has resulted in very few cases of Covid, no deaths and most of the few cases of Covid that did occur were brought in by prisoners who were brought in on sentence or on remand. So it was people from the outside was the main source of Covid within the prison.”

The reason such stringent restrictions were – and still are – enforced is the risk of infection posed by the confined prison environment”

The success has come at a cost, however, and prisoners have had to lead exceptionally solitary lives, while prison officers and other staff have all been affected. Family visits, gatherings within the prison, religious services – all of these were put on hold in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.

“I think it’s been an incredibly difficult time for prisoners,” says Keith Adams, social policy advocate for the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. “What often hasn’t been recognised the last 17 months is the level of sacrifice they’ve made. A key challenge has been the lack of resumption of family visits and visits from outside – there have been no visits since level 5 came back in December, no resumption.

“There’s been advances and technical upgrades, such as video call, but that’s only a substitute for a while and doesn’t meet the real needs people have for time with spouses, partners, relatives and children as well. It’s very difficult and not recognised as well. For older prisoners, they’ve had a high degree of cocooning in a very isolated setting with the withdrawal of a lot of supports such as education and classes due to the pandemic. A person is left with a lot of extra time, but a lot of services are not available to fill that.”

Prisoners

“Anecdotally – to give a sense of the cost to prisoners – if a person gets temporary release or time out of prison, they have to quarantine when they get back and anecdotally people have refused to take up the temporary release because of that period of mandatory quarantine. That gives a sense of the difficulty, of the reluctance to leave because of that two week period.”

The reason such stringent restrictions were – and still are – enforced is the risk of infection posed by the confined prison environment. As is evidenced by the United States, prisons can become hot-spots in a manner similar to care facilities. Mr Adams believes that prisons should be treated akin to care facilities, particularly with regard to vaccination.

“When you look at the level of people medically vulnerable in prison, they often have a higher degree of underlying conditions than the general public,” he continues. “So, for example, in the UK, a study of the health needs of prisons – if we just think of respiratory conditions, which are very vulnerable to Covid-19 – in a general population, about 8% of people will have an underlying respiratory condition. In prisons, it’s about 15%. These aren’t Irish numbers, but they give a sense that there’s a higher degree of underlying conditions in prisons.

“It’s also things to do with poverty as well, more chaotic lives, poor quality housing – various things can lead to these conditions. For those reasons, prisons should be viewed as a care setting.”

You have an area of society no longer to worry about, a couple of thousand prisoners vaccinated”

Both Mr Adams and Fr McVerry were critical of delays in the vaccination supply, with just 2% of the prison population vaccinated at the time of speaking (May 31). Fr McVerry says the “worst thing” for prisoners about the delay in the vaccine rollout is not knowing when they will regain their basic freedoms.

“The worst thing is not knowing what’s going to happen, how long this is going to last for,” Fr McVerry continues. “The other thing about prisons, anybody who came into the prison was isolated for two weeks. They were 24 hours a day in their cells with absolutely no contact with anybody. That was very difficult. They couldn’t have a phone call, they had no way of contacting the outside. I don’t why they weren’t prioritised. It’s a small population, 3,000 plus. They could have done them all in a morning.”

Given the level of hardship the prisoners have been subjected too, Mr Adams says he cannot understand why prisoners were not prioritised.

“Ireland was vaccinating well over 50,000 people a day as well,” Mr Adams begins. “For a small population that have very restrained lives, and who have had a further loss of agency and loss of autonomy over the last 17 months, it would have taken very little to vaccinate a small portion of the population and to allow the prison regime – while it would politically unfavourable – it would have been the leadership required. You have an area of society no longer to worry about, a couple of thousand prisoners vaccinated.

“There will likely be long term costs to not vaccinating, if prisoners are left to the very end. With just the lack of family time, the lack of their autonomy and agency, there was a huge opportunity to vaccinate early and would have removed the risk of any outbreak. Just from the perspective or prison officers as well, the small number that were vaccinated, and I suppose if you follow the argument through, if a prison in a pandemic is particularly a case for being a care facility, prison officers would be considered front line workers.”

While the Irish Prison Service have managed Covid-19 outbreaks with great success, they and the Government’s inability to vaccinate prisoners and staff means we are “failing” some of the most vulnerable in our society, Mr Adams says.

It’s hard to imagine what the last 17 months have been like for prisoners. To really understand, it would have to be lived”

“Within the Irish prison rules, there’s this idea of Equity in Healthcare where people in prison – whatever healthcare standards are available outside of prison, that should also be available to prisoners as well,” he explains. “You shouldn’t be disadvantaged in receiving any kind of diagnostic or curative or preventative intervention. You could probably go as far as to say that the prison service is in contravention of its prison rules, when you have such a low number of prisoners who have been vaccinated. It’s also the Department of Health and the HSE.

“It’s hard to imagine what the last 17 months have been like for prisoners. To really understand, it would have to be lived,” Mr Adams concludes.