Inside the Monkey House: My Time as an Irish Prison Officer
by John Cuffe (Collins Press, € 12.99)
John Cuffe dealt with some of the most depraved and violent people in this country during his 30 years as a prison officer, between 1978 and 2007.
During his long years in Arbour Hill, where the worst offenders are concentrated for their own protection, he did his duty and treated all inmates equally, whatever their crime. But what a struggle it was. He felt only hatred for Brendan O’Donnell, a triple-killer: ‘…what I despised about O’Donnell most was his slaying of three-year-old Liam Riney with a bullet through his little head: his ear, to be precise.’
Did this revolting individual really deserve the same respect from him as another prisoner, Dean Lyons, the inoffensive young man everyone knew was innocent of the murder of two women in Grangegorman?
Earlier postings to Mountjoy and Spike Island in the 1980s had fully immersed Cuffe in the realities of the Irish penal system. Both institutions were seriously overcrowded; violent attacks were quotidian; and many of the prisoners were ‘different’ from those he had come across in his early years: addicted to drugs, they were unpredictable, hard to read. Their weapons included novelties such as blood-filled syringes, as well as knives and blades.
In Cuffe’s experience most prisoners are cooperative and quiet. The violent few often direct their violence at themselves. The ‘cutters’ mutilate themselves to draw attention to a need or want such as a transfer to a prison closer to home. The quiet, inconspicuous inmates are more likely to be the ones found hanging from the bars of a cell window.
Cuffe does not tell us whether counselling was available to the officers who had to take down the corpses and face down the thugs. He had no-one to go to after a prisoner attacked him one day with boiling water. His quick reactions saved him from the facial disfigurement which is a common sight in our gaols.
Cuffe castigates Michael Noonan, the Justice Minister at the time, for opening Spike Island as a prison in 1985, then refusing to co-operate with the parliamentary committee that enquired into the riots there – the worst in Irish penal history – in the summer of that year: Noonan owed it to the country to explain why he had sent violent and disordered young men to a ‘matchbox’ prison.
But Cuffe reserves his most severe criticism for the Department of Justice, which makes a difficult profession even more challenging by imposing long periods of overtime on officers. More recruitment and standard shifts would greatly improve the lives of prison officers and their families. This angry, revealing book deserves all the attention it gets.