Women Locked Up: New documentary shows life in Ireland's largest prison for females
Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas is a three-part series on Virgin Media One.
“You get three hots and a cot. That’s the old saying,” says a woman in the documentary series Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas, referring to the regular meals and a bed afforded to women in the Dóchas Centre, Ireland’s largest all-female prison. “You come in, you get well. It’s insanity – you do it all over again. That’s the power of addiction, doing the same thing over and over again, and getting the same results.”
The woman in prison, whose name is withheld, was without a mother from the age of four, she tells the Virgin Media One series. She spent her childhood moving around care homes. She started using heroin at 13 years of age, becoming part of a gang of about 15 homeless kids who roamed Dublin’s city streets. Most of them are dead now. She entered treatment aged 16, and worked as a care attendant in Dublin’s St James’s Hospital for about a decade, but picked up drugs again in her twenties owing to post-natal depression. She first entered prison aged 40.
One of several striking items from Women Locked Up is the age profile of the women inside – they are not predominantly young. Women aged in their thirties and forties represent the prison’s biggest cohorts. The Dóchas Centre has one woman in her eighties. Perhaps the most revealing fact from the three-part documentary series is that 70 percent of the women imprisoned struggle with addiction problems. It's a fascinating, and at times a difficult series to take in, but one that is important.
“Historically, it's always good to go behind the walls of institutions,” says Pamela Drynan, director of Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas. “I was keen to look at the humanity of the women there. We often don't appreciate that there are approximately 180 women in Dóchas on Dublin’s North Circular Road. I wanted the opportunity to talk to them and show a wider public the lives of the women there.
“I guess in a sense that we can't look away all of the time. It's a challenge for society to deal with. It's important to look at who ends up in Dóchas and why, and what we can do as a society to help people not end up in the criminal justice system, and then if they do, to look at how we might make their integration back into society more supported.”
Filming was originally interrupted by the pandemic, but concluded following seven months of shooting earlier this year. Midas Productions, the makers behind it, are following up on a landmark series they made a decade ago, Women on the Inside, among other documentary investigations into Ireland’s prison system. Drynan has previous experience filming in British prisons.
“Something that surprised me was the number of women who said that prison saved their lives,” says Drynan. “That's a devastating fact – that prison was their safe place, somewhere to have a moment's pause, a moment away from the chaos on the outside, their traumas, abuse. It's a sad reflection. The biggest surprise was to see how many people were suffering from mental illness in prison. I know that's something they have to deal with on a daily basis."
Another aspect that surprised Drynan was how fearful women were about leaving. "The full reality hits when you are out of the institution, or the community of prison, and you have to take those steps forward. It can feel like you're on your own. Having more step-down facilities or supported accommodation would help. I know there are services on the outside, but having a tight plan and that support, including a treatment plan in place or some connection on the outside to help move forward, is necessary.”
Siobhán is an inspiring character in the documentary. She heads up the Bridge Project, a programme to help women in Dóchas (which means “hope” in Irish) to transition to life on the outside. She has walked the walk. Growing up in Fatima Mansions, an inner-city flat complex in Dublin, she was a drug addict for over three decades, much of those years spent homeless, and feeling worthless. She also had two children.
Siobhán entered prison for the first time aged 17, and remained going in and out, as if through a revolving door, until she was 38. Through recovery, she has stayed out of prison for eight years, and has found a mission in life – to motivate other women caught in an addiction-prison cycle that it’s possible to have another life.
"Dóchas is an interesting place,” says Drynan. “There's a lot of great staff, great humour, good teamwork. I really noticed moments of lightness. There's groups organised for music. The education department's great. There were events organised around mental health week that enabled a lot of women to come together and perhaps forget the fact that they were in prison and just talk and congregate."
Drynan says she learnt a lot while making the show. "I took away the fact that women are more courageous, resilient, and generous than you can ever expect or imagine. Prison staff are working in a very challenging environment. A lot of them deserve praise for their tenacity, especially with over-crowding and the huge volume of women coming in and out of prison. We all need to be a bit more concerned about the fact that not everyone is housed or safe in society. Crime doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's hard not to feel empathy with women that have had such hard lives.”
- Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas will be screened on Virgin Media One, 9pm, Monday to Wednesday, November 11-13
It’s a man’s world The Dóchas Centre is one of two all-female prisons in the Republic of Ireland. The other one is in Limerick. There is a tremendous extra toll taken on mothers who enter prison in comparison to men who are parents. If a child rings a mother following, say, a meltdown in school, there is only so much solace she can give her distressed child over the six minutes allotted for the phone call.
Then there is the not knowing how their children are really faring in the outside world, being unable to help them navigate the world, to protect them. Mothers and especially their growing children develop into different people while apart. If, for example, a mother enters prison for a five-year sentence, leaving behind an eight-year-old child, that child will be another person at 12- or 13-years-old when the mother is released.
Speaking in the documentary Women Locked Up: Inside the Dóchas, Chief Officer Harris adds some context: “It is a completely different dynamic for a woman than it is for a man being in prison. I’ve seen fellas going to prison very flighty, doesn’t bother them in the slightest – 12 months on their back... They get their visits every week off their girlfriend or their wife. They get their money dropped in. Their kids come up and visit them. Very often in here if the ladies are locked up, and they have a partner. Their partner an awful lot of the time is in the system as well."
He adds that many of the female inmates won't get visits from their kids as their children are already in the care system.
