The Midlands Prison in Portlaoise, Co Laois, was subject to the most “Category A” complaints in 2023, according to the latest annual report of the Office of the Inspector of Prisons.
Category A complaints relate to allegations of a serious nature such as assault or use of excessive force against a prisoner or ill treatment, racial abuse, discrimination, intimidation, threats.
According the annual report of the inspector’s office, published on Friday, a total of 19 serious – or Category A – complaints were made about the treatment of prisoners in the Midlands Prison.
This compares to the prison with the next highest number of complaints, Cloverhill Prison in Dublin, which registered 12 such complaints on behalf of prisoners; Limerick Prison had seven complaints; Cork and Dublin’s Mountjoy had six each.
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There were no complaints made on behalf of prisoners in either Shelton Abbey in Co Wicklow, Loughan House in Co Cavan or Arbour Hill in Dublin.
In a foreword to the report, the chief inspector of prisons, Mark Kelly, said the prison population had at the time of writing exceeded 4,900 people, “many hundreds in excess of the number that can be safely accommodated”.
[ Midlands Prison: ‘Even clothes coming in were soaked in psychoactive substances’Opens in new window ]
He said “the scourge of overcrowding” was affecting almost every prison in Ireland.
Inspectors had noted prisoners were sleeping on mattresses on the floors of shared cells, “impairing their daily lives and marring the working conditions of prison staff”.
The situation found during a May 2023 inspection of Cloverhill Prison was “particularly grave”, he said.
“At the outset of the inspection, 152 people, one third of the prison’s population, were being held four to a cell measuring less than 12 square metres, with one occupant sleeping on a mattress on the floor in each of these 38 cells. The in-cell lavatories were not partitioned and prisoners were eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in these highly-confined, stuffy and malodorous spaces,” he said.
“Inter-prisoner violence was the inevitable result of confining four adult men in these degrading conditions,” he said.
This report also identifies a lack of access to purposeful activity and limited out-of-cell time for people on restricted regimes as systemic issues in several of the prisons inspected.
The report praises the “very many examples of prison staff engaging with people in their custody in a highly professional and often compassionate way”.
However, it noted “regrettable exceptions during the September 2023 inspection of the Dóchas [Women’s Prison] Centre in Dublin, where the cumulative effect of poor staff-prisoner dynamics and overly punitive sanctions was having a substantial adverse effect on the day-to-day lives of the women living there”. Mr Kelly said this finding echoed the concerns raised about the Dóchas Centre from 2020 onwards.
The report also noted people with serious mental health disorders being held in prisons were “not receiving the right care, in the right environment, at the right time”.
“The Irish Prison Service is enduring an overcrowding crisis that can only be resolved through courageous action at political level, such as agreeing to impose an enforceable ceiling on the number of people who can safely be held in each prison,” he said.
