Many experts believe the Government's plan for extra prison places is an expensive mistake. Conor Lally reports.
When the Dublin criminal Paul Cunningham was shot dead by two assailants as he lay in bed in Mulhuddart, Dublin, last November, the Minister for Justice Michael McDowell urged the public not to make too much of the murder.
"I don't believe there is new energy in crime in Dublin, I believe that it is to some extent the sting of the dying wasp," he said. However, even a cursory examination of some of the moves afoot in the agencies under the Minister's control reveal that he could not possibly believe serious crime is on the wane.
At the garda training colleague in Templemore, Co Tipperary, the first batch of the extra 2,000 gardaí to be recruited are in their second month of training. All of these new recruits will be on the streets by 2008 tackling crime.
Meanwhile, proposals to increase our prison population by one third to around 4,200 are now taking shape. This aggressive expansion of the prison system is happening in the absence of any real debate and is being planned against a backdrop of a two-year fall in crime. Last year, serious crime fell by 4 per cent, following a 3 per cent fall in 2003.
At present there is room for 3,200 inmates in the system. When the new Mountjoy complex is built in Thornton, north Co Dublin, replacing the one on Dublin's North Circular Road, there will be a net gain of prison spaces. Cork Prison is also to be replaced with a bigger one. The existing Portlaoise Prison is to be extended with the addition of 150 spaces and there are plans to add a small number of spaces to Wheatfield prison in Dublin. All of these projects will come on stream in the next two to five years, but no exact figures for the increase in capacity in each prison are available. However, it is estimated that the total number of spaces in the system will increase by around one third to 4,200.
When the extra spaces are provided, Ireland will rank fifth in the prisoner per capita table of 16 Western European nations, with a prison population of 111 inmates per 100,000, according to figures from the Irish Penal Reform Trust. Currently we are joint 11th, with 85 inmates per 100,000.
If the Northern peace process was to drastically falter and a return to conflict ensued, the State would undoubtedly find candidates to fill the extra capacity. But if such a scenario does not arise, many probation officers and experts in the crime and punishment field claim the Minister for Justice's plans to provide more prison spaces are misguided.
They believe qualitative research on crime and sentencing should be undertaken before we embark down the expensive road of building new prisons. Some believe we do not use imprisonment as we should. The say far too many people are being sent to prison for minor offences for short periods, and they question what purpose this serves. Minister McDowell, they say, needs to focus on investing more in the alternatives to imprisonment, which are cheaper and can have a far more rehabilitative effect.
At the Institute of Criminology in UCD, Dr Ian O'Donnell says plans to create more prison spaces now should be viewed in the same light as similar developments in 1997. In 1994, he said, the Government of the day decided 210 spaces were needed to bring capacity up to 2,200. When the current Government was first elected in 1997 it decided to quadruple to 840 the estimate for new places needed.
O'Donnell believes the Government was swayed by the emotion that gripped the country after the 1996 murders of Veronica Guerin and Det Garda Jerry McCabe. He says there was no scientific basis for providing the extra spaces and says a member of the 1997 Cabinet has told him the increased estimate was decided following a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation. Current policy makers, he says, are operating in a similar information vacuum and allowing political motivations to dictate penal policy.
"Alternatives to imprisonment should be fully explored. Building new prison spaces is so expensive it would seem logical that it should come much further down the road. A lot of people sentenced to imprisonment here are going to jail for very short periods of time. They could be diverted in very straightforward fashion [to alternative punishments]."
Paul O'Mahony is a leading criminologist and senior psychology lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. He believes Irish politicians - both those in Government and on the opposition benches - have traditionally lacked the maturity and courage to shun populist point-scoring on crime in favour of reasoned debate. "The debate here has always been fearful and narrow," he says. "The whole idea of clamping down hard on crime was a major factor in the current Government getting into power back in 1997. But the reality is that even though there are around 3,200 people in the prison system on any one day, only around 10 per cent of these are serving sentences for offences against the person, the kinds of serious crimes that the Minister would have us believe prison is all about.
"There's a huge amount of people in jail for traffic offences, for defaulting on fines or minor robberies. I would argue that that's an abuse of the prison system. If somebody is being sent to jail for such a short time you'd have to ask if their crime was serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence at all."
Of the 5,314 committals to Irish prisons in 2003, 2,031 involved sentences of less than three months. Of these, 769 cases involved road traffic offences. A further 976 were in respect of other, unspecified, minor offences and on immigration matters. In total, 53 per cent of men in prison were serving sentences of less than six months, and this figure was 73 per cent for female inmates.
O'Mahony says few, if any, of such cases should have resulted in a prison sentence. It is the most expensive option possible for the State to send these low-risk offenders to jail, and society has not been made any safer by imprisoning them, he argues.
The Irish Penal Reform Trust believes the imprisonment of minor offenders can have a very detrimental effect on them. In its submission last September to the National Crime Council, the trust noted that locking up such offenders "stigmatises individuals, breaks up family relationships, and often fosters self-pity, aggression or defiance". The trust is critical of the Government's reluctance to invest in the Probation and Welfare Service and to develop projects such as a drugs court. A pilot drugs court operating in Dublin's north inner city was reviewed over two years ago, but no steps have been taken to advance the matter.
Probation officers point to what they see as the lack of investment in services they provide as proof that the Government has its priorities wrong.
Oliver Fallon works as a probation officer and is a spokesman for the IMPACT union's Probation and Welfare branch. He says even the crudest analysis of expenditure confirms that the Government has prioritised jailing offenders over trying to rehabilitate them. The entire Probation and Welfare Service had a budget of €40 million in 2003, some €20 million less than was earned by prison officers in overtime alone in that year. Probation and Welfare has 323 staff, compared with 3,329 in the prison service.
"Locking people up is a very expensive option," says Fallon, "and in many cases we can work with offenders, particularly first-time offenders, and get much better outcomes."
Fallon says there are many sentencing options available as an alternative to imprisonment. Offenders can be placed under a probation supervision order, under which conditions such as a curfew or staying away from certain areas can be attached. If offenders are not fully compliant, a term of imprisonment can be activated. They can also be sentenced to community service orders. Under these, an individual can be ordered to do up to 240 hours of community work.
Those brought before the courts can also be ordered to undergo treatment for drugs or alcohol addiction. In the case of sex offenders, particularly those involved in internet child pornography, they can be ordered to participate in long-term therapy such as that offered by the Dublin-based Granada Institute.
Fallon believes these options can work for many offenders, bringing about a positive and lasting change in offender behaviour which imprisonment rarely delivers. Failure to research how these avenues could be fully developed and to make the required investment is a major failing of our response to crime, he says.
The Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell is another subscriber to the view that non-custodial options are not being maximised. In a value-for-money audit of the Probation and Welfare service last April he noted: "the value and importance of alternatives have tended to be undervalued and underplayed during the years", and he called for a greater use of non-custodial sanctions. He estimated that "implementing community service orders costs about one-third of the cost of implementing the custodial sentences that might otherwise be imposed".
The Irish Prison Service says the prison population is changing and it needs to respond. A failure to increase the number of available beds will result in a return to the revolving door system of the 1980s, it says.
The service's spokesman, Jim Mitchell, says following the 1996 bail referendum, which made it easier for the courts to refuse bail, the number of people remanded in custody awaiting trial increased greatly. He says there are now a very significant number of non-nationals being detained in relation to immigration matters. This was not a factor five to 10 years ago, he points out.
The number of prisoners serving life sentences has increased three-fold since 1994, to 204 at present. This has "silted up" the prison system. Mitchell says plans to introduce mandatory sentencing for some offences, such as those involving firearms, will further add to the pressure on the system.
He rejects the Irish Penal Reform Trust's assertion that the Republic will have one of the biggest per capita jail populations in Western Europe when the current plans are executed. "Back in 1997 just under 20 per cent of inmates were on temporary release. Because there was so much pressure on spaces, people had to be released to make way for new arrivals. Inmates wouldn't agree to transfers to open centres because they felt if they stayed put they'd be released and they wouldn't go on educational courses and the like for the same reason. The prison service fell into disrepute.
"We have 2,000 gardaí coming on stream in the next few years, which will lead to detection of more crime. We also want to end slopping out and to move to single-cell occupancy, that's what the plans will allow us to do. It's about planning for future demands, not just for current needs."
