Cork City Jail

 One thing that has been interesting to me is true crime. It can either be watching it, reading it, or learning about it! This is part of why I am a criminal justice major, and that is what has brought me to Ireland. One of my classes is to compare the criminal justice systems between America and both Northern Ireland and Ireland. With that being said, our adventure as a class yesterday was to Cork to visit the old city jail. This jail was in operation from 1824-1923, which means that it was open during the country's civil war to gain independence from Britain. A little history of the prison. It held women, children, and men all at once at one point of its working life. In the year 1878, it became a female-only prison, but that changed during the revolution to house both male and female inmates, just keeping them in different wings. 

It was a very interesting place to see. There are parts of it that they have kept updated so that people can visit since it is now a museum, but there are some parts of it that they have left to deteriorate and let the elements take over. In a way, this is a symbolic way to show the kind of life that the prisoners were living when they were in there. They were forgotten about and left to sit with very little good treatment. Within the poem Easter 1916, it talks about the Easter Rising and how people were changing because of the cause, and they wanted their freedom. He says in the poem, "He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly." Within this line, he says that a man whom he has either seen or known has changed or been transformed because of the conflict that is going on, almost like he has changed for the worse, or was it for the better, because he was fighting for his country. These were the kind of people who were held in this jail during the war of independence. Those were doing what they had to do for their country and in the end, they ended up in jail.