Inside is the only reality for women prisoners

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

Thankfully the vast majority of us will never see the inside of a prison cell – unless you count that school tour to Kilmainham. But jail is a reality for over 4,000 prisoners in Ireland – and just 160 of them are women.

RTÉ has just finished showing Women on the Inside, a fascinating two-part fly-on-the-wall documentary that looks at the reality of life in the Dóchas Centre in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison and in the wing of Limerick jail where a handful more females are housed.

It’s from Midas Productions, who previous made Life on the Inside – but there is something even more pathetic about this one. Not in the making, mind you, but in the utter futility of these women’s lives.

One of them, Jenny, isn’t an hour out of prison, for example, before she’s hunkered down on the street with a naggin of whiskey to pour into her coffee – and she still has the documentary team’s radio mic attached to her belt.

The prisoners, for the most part, came out of this offering little prospect of changing; recidivism is their lot, not least because of their addictions, but also because they are homeless and hopeless.

Jenny – the same one who heads for the off licence as soon as she’s cashed her Dole cheque on discharge – ended up delaying her temporary release because there was nowhere for her to go. She was one of 11 in the same boat.

The only place the State could offer was actually a prison cell; there were 60 women on the outside ahead of her in the queue and only then could she hope to secure emergency accommodation in a B&B.

Not that you’d feel hugely sorry for them despite the best efforts of the makers to show their human side; remember these women are here because they committed a crime.

Jenny has 347 previous convictions for petty crime, and she’s articulate despite her addiction. “Half of my life has flashed by me through these places; half of my friends – they’re all dead,” she says.

Maria from Bolivia is being deported after she was caught smuggling drugs into Ireland, but she’s philosophical enough to reveal that she can at least speak English now before she’s deported back home.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.