TRADING IN LIVES IN THE CRIME INDUSTRY

The death of a prisoner every so often seems to be the accepted price as
the establishment benefits from zero tolerance for some, writes Gene Kerrigan

He wasn't considered ``at risk''. He was just another loser, doing a short
sentence for a petty crime. It wasn't like he was facing years in Mountjoy.
Just a three-month sentence, and he'd get out long before that. No need to
hang himself.

But, none of us can enter the mind of a 25-year-old locked up with a
chamber pot, sharing a cell, cut off from the things that gave his life
meaning. We can only guess at the depression, the terror, the hopelessness
that can lead to someone giving up on life.

Outside, people commit suicide for all kinds of reasons. In the hothouse of
a prison, the reasons come more easily to the surface. A problem becomes a
crisis. At Mountjoy last week, at Wheatfield the week before, prisoners
slipped over the edge. Prison officers can supervise prisoners, but even
checking every 15 minutes leaves lots of time for someone to twist a
bedsheet into a rope.

The mass of prisoners are small-timers who come from areas where petty
crime and not-so-petty crime is an option from an early age, one of the few
options on offer. Where hope is not in excessive supply.

Periodic terms behind bars are part of the lifestyle. Almost all of the
vast apparatus of criminal justice is aimed at the people who live in such
areas, who commit the petty and not-so-petty crimes. Much of the thievery
practised elsewhere in society often isn't even defined as crime.

Crime is a business from which insurance companies, security firms,
lawyers, gardai, prison officers, politicians and the media all get their
cut in one way or another.

The ghettoes, social and geographic, are not seen by the establishment as a
problem: they are a solution. Therein, the offcuts from society may be
herded, policed, regularly jailed.

The worst of the heroin problem can be allowed fester in confined areas,
where the odd copper, priest or social worker puts body and soul into
treating these people as people, as real as the rest of us.

The disruption caused by criminal forays into more prosperous areas are a
price we pay. We declare zero tolerance, pack them more tightly into
overcrowded prisons, build more prisons, pay more overtime, create an
industry around crime. It is as though they are a different species from us.

Any blasphemous thought that it doesn't have to be this way is quickly
stifled.

Occasionally a Philip Sheedy, ``one of us,'' gets caught up in the
machinery. Quickly, the class buttons are pushed, word goes out and
compassion surges through the system.

People locked into class, social, geographic and spiritual ghettoes develop
the same problems as the rest of us, and occasionally suicide is an option.
The pressures of those ghettoes are more intense than the rest of us feel;
the pressures cannot but be compounded when a jail sentence is added.

Prisons are dangerous places, where hope can be hard to find. Yet, we jail
people at twice the rate of neighbouring jurisdictions. We are casual about
prison. Politicians boast about their readiness to lock people up.

Of late, the Dublin courts have seen some judges using prison as an
instrument of social engineering. They put people away for six years or
nine years, for truly petty crime, in the hope of forcing them off drugs,
as a means of straightening them out.

That judges make such decisions out of compassion is undoubted. That this
practice puts some people in situations of extreme pressure is also beyond
doubt.

No one thought that poor man in Mountjoy was so close to the edge. Even had
he not been jailed, he might have found a solution to his troubles in
suicide. There's nothing to be gained in pointing fingers.

In a culture of zero tolerance, where ghettoes are tolerated, where the
Department of Justice is an oblivious machine, where the minister is a
buffoon, where the prisons are crammed, where let's face it the judges are
guessing, and guessing with people's lives, it is inevitable that the
occasional prisoner will be found hanging from a bedsheet.

It has been going on for years. It's part of our culture. There will be
expressions of concern. Same as the last time. Same as the next.