A Joy to behold
BACK TO THE JOY
RTE One, 9.35pm AROUND 21 years on from his groundbreaking series director Donald Taylor Black goes back inside Mountjoy Prison to see how the it has changed for staff, prisoners and their families.
The Joy, which aired in 1997, told the story of Ireland’s most famous prison with unprecedented access and became a national talking point. The original four-part series was the first time the degrading system of “slopping out” – or the process of using buckets as toilets in cells during lock-up at night and then emptying them out in the morning – was shown on Irish television.
It was finally replaced by in-cell sanitation throughout the prison in 2014.
However, new problems have emerged in the form of Dublin’s vicious gangland feud which has become a disquieting feature of Irish life and, consequently, of Irish prisons.
Arond 300 prisoners across 14 separate factions are secluded/ separated because of possible danger from gang feuding.
Mobile phones were in their infancy when the original series was made but in 2015, 265 were confiscated at Mountjoy. The Women’s Prison, subject of Part Three of the original series, has changed radically, in almost every way.
In 1996/1997 it was situated in a wing of St Patrick’s Institution, for young male offenders, but since 1999 it occupies a new series of purpose-built buildings called the Dochas Centre where prisoners live in seven separate houses. Nevertheless, overcrowding remains a problem.