‘If I’m entirely honest, he comes across as likable,” says Stephen Nolan, shaking his head as he leaves an interview with a 6ft 6in Lithuanian man serving 10 years for beating a man to death in an alleyway. “And that battle is why I’m here.”
Nolan is a Northern Irish journalist who has been given unprecedented access to a high-security prison in County Antrim for serious and paramilitary offenders. The result is a powerful and gripping series, Jailed: Inside Maghaberry Prison, in which Nolan interviews prisoners and staff to find out – well, how that whole loss of liberty, societal need for punishment and opportunity for rehabilitation to prevent recidivism thing is working out. It is delivered in six tight, punchy half-hour episodes that give you much to think about, once you’ve stopped reeling from the impact.
As Nolan notes, Maghaberry was described in 2015 by the then chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, as the most dangerous prison he had ever been to. Among the endearments shouted at him from cell windows as he walks through the grounds (“Nolan, ya fat prick!” “Nolan, ya fat bastard!”) are accusations of corruption, neglect and drugs being rife in the prison. Rage and frustration are palpable everywhere and he is often buttonholed by jumpy, volatile prisoners keen to give their opinion of the place – though often less keen to explain why they are inside it.
Not that Nolan is one to let them get away with what seem to be well-practised evasions. We hear some amazing circumlocutions that allow the inmates to swerve responsibility. (“I’ve been told hundreds of times what I was … part of … That’s probably around the situation of it” is the best one man can do when presented with a detailed account of his case and conviction; he was the leader of a gang that defrauded people of nearly £200,000.) But Nolan presses and challenges and follows the men’s claims to their logical conclusions to what feels like an unfashionable or rude degree, so used are we to interviewers allowing people to state their truth and letting it stand alone. “Where’s the morality inside you?” he asks a drug dealer. “Were you desperate for money? Why didn’t you stop?”
With others – with the mentally distressed or the (officially or unofficially) medicated – he is gentler but no less probing. “Really, David?” he says in almost fatherly tones to one young inmate who is giving him what Nolan knows to be a very partial account of his crimes indeed. But when David wells up, he doesn’t comfort him; he asks him why.
When a clearly vulnerable, equally young – so many of them are so young – man descends into near-incoherence as his grip on reality slips, Nolan tries to calm him, while also letting the intractable sadness of the boy’s situation speak for itself. But every episode is punctuated with reminders that most of the 1,000 men in here “have done terrible things” and caused terrible suffering to others. “Prison may be hard, but it’s temporary. The grief [the prisoners] inflict never goes away.”
He doesn’t press the governor of the prison quite so hard. Unprecedented access, even for a relative bruiser of a journalist, presumably has its price. Still, simply by virtue of the men being visible on camera, where it is as hard to fake remorse as it is to fake good or bad mental health, the systemic problems about what we do with our criminals (and perhaps even what we do to, with and for our men) are gradually limned. Nolan, for his part, articulates his own internal conflicts about the situation. “How do we punish him for who he is,” he says of one prisoner, “but change him into who he needs to be?”
Anger, depression, mental illness, remorse, denial, cauterised feelings and in a few cases an apparent absence of them are all on display. The governor, David Savage, insists that rehabilitation is possible and on offer under his roof. Even if this is true, it is hard to see how intervention at this very late stage in all the recidivist careers on show can make much difference. And of course it won’t undo the suffering of the victims already left in their wakes, though the point is to prevent the accretion of more. Nolan speaks from the heart and perhaps for all of us when he says with compassion and despair as David’s broken rant continues: “We need to fix you. Because imagine you going outside in this state.” Jailed, however, is light on suggestions of how this can be done.
• Jailed: Inside Maghaberry Prison is available on BBC iPlayer.
