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BACK TO THE JOY ***New***

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The Joy 1997 Donald Taylor Black Image Ref. No. 2095/094 Image Name: The Joy 1997 Donald Taylor Black Image Ref. No. 2095/094
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21 years ago The Joy told the story of Ireland’s most famous prison with unprecedented access to staff and prisoners and became a national talking point.

Featuring archive from the 1997 series and access inside the prison today, Back to The Joy returns to Mountjoy Prison to see how the life has changed for staff, the prisoners and their families.

The original series was the first time that 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.

Although slopping out is over new problems have emerged, issues like Dublin’s vicious gangland feud have become a disquieting feature of Irish life and, consequently, of Irish prisons. Approximately 300 prisoners across 14 separate factions are now 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 1996/7 it was situated in a wing of St. Patrick’s Institution, for young male offenders, but since 1999 it occupies a completely new series of purpose-built buildings called the Dóchas Centre where the prisoners live in seven separate houses. Nevertheless, overcrowding remains a problem.

 

Background: 

The Joy was a four part documentary series originally broadcast in 1997 where for the first time cameras were given extensive access to Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. Now over 20 years on from that ground-breaking series, filmmaker Donald Taylor Black goes back inside Mountjoy to see how life inside has changed in the intervening years.

What was different about Black’s four-part series from previous films on the subject, was that instead of concealing the identity of prisoners and staff, they sought the permission to show every person in shot.  The Joy provided an unprecedented look inside Ireland’s largest and most controversial prison. The four parts covered a day in the life, the prison drugs scene, the female prison and a final programme called ‘Them and Us’ charting the relationship between the prisoners and prison officers during a hostage crisis and prison siege. The production team spent six weeks in Mountjoy during the summer and autumn of 1996.

Viewing figures for The Joy were unprecedented for a documentary series averaging 796,000 viewers per episode and 56.7% audience share. Episode 3 ‘In The Female Prison’ was watched by 877,000 people and had an audience share of 62.1%.