A planned major expansion in prison places is not justified by the numbers being imprisoned in recent years, a new study has concluded.
The building of a new 1,400- bed prison at Thornton Hall in north Co Dublin is just one of a number of projects under way to boost the number of prison places significantly.
But the necessity for the expansion is challenged in a paper, Stagnation and Change in Irish Penal Policy, by Dr Ian O'Donnell, head of the Institute of Criminology in UCD, to be published shortly in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice.
Dr O'Donnell analyses the trends in the level of imprisonment in Ireland since 1992, and finds that the rate of committal to prison has fallen since then, from 164.8 per 100,000 in 1992 to 125.2 per 100,000 in 2004.
Both the number in prison and the committal rate peaked in 1994, when there were 6,866 committals to prison, representing 191.5 per 100,000.
The number of committals has fallen steadily since then, with 5,064 in 2004, the last year for which figures are available, representing a committal rate of 125.2 per 100,000 for that year.
Some of those committals, notably those for fine-defaulting, were for very short periods of time, according to Dr O'Donnell.
About 25 per cent of all committals are for fine-defaulting, but these people only spend a matter of days in prison.
Therefore the total number of people in prison on an average day was lower than the number of committals, averaging 3,199 in 2004.
In 2006 the total number of prison spaces required by 2011 was estimated at almost 5,000, according to Department of Justice figures published by The Irish Times.
The planned additional places were 1,400 in Thornton Hall, replacing the 878-bed Mountjoy complex and adding 500 more places; a new "super-prison" for the Munster region on Cork's Spike Island, with 450 places, replacing the old 90-bed jail on the island and Cork prison, with 259 places, which is due for closure; a further 138 places in Portlaoise; 60 more in Castlerea; and 50 more in Limerick.
"It is hard to see where the pressure for all these places is coming from," commented Dr O'Donnell.
He acknowledged that the increased number of life- sentenced prisoners, due to the increased murder rate, meant that there were more people in the system serving long sentences, but this did not justify such a major expansion in prison places.
"It could be argued that an opportunity exists for politicians and policy-makers to declare a moratorium on prison building and review the proposed further expansion of the prison system," he writes.
"However, given the current tenor of the debate about crime, such an eventuality must be considered unlikely."