Statistics issued by the British Home Office which show the Republic has the third-fastest rate of expansion among its prison population in the world were selective, Mr Sean Aylward, the director of the Prison Service, said yesterday.
"Our prison population is growing from one of the lowest bases in the developed world," said Mr Aylward. Up to four years ago one in five of the "sentenced population" was at large on temporary release because there was no place to hold them.
That had been corrected, and now there was a reasonable expectation that people would serve their sentences, or if they were at large it was because they were participating in a specific programme.
In terms of "raw numbers", Mr Aylward said, "we're very low". For example, Scotland, a similar jurisdiction, had 120 persons in prison per 100,000 of the population compared to the Republic's 90 per 100,000. He believed there was little chance that the current situation would significantly change and that Irish sentencing rates would match those of Scotland.
But Mr Aylward, who was speaking on RTE radio, was challenged by a criminologist, Mr Paul O'Mahony, who said the British Home Office figures were "very short-term", just over two years. "In fact, our prison population has been increasing since the 1960s." Over that time there had been roughly a tenfold increase in the number of people incarcerated.
The prison population had doubled within the lifetime of the present Government, Mr O'Mahony said, from 2,000 to 4,000. There was inherently a long-term trend involved in the process of expanding the number of prison places.
Over the 40-year period, he added there had been a huge increase in crime and in the number of people sentenced to prison.
"We're increasing at a rate that is far greater than our neighbouring countries in Western Europe," he said. In England three people were sent to prison for 1,000 serious indictable crimes. Here, the figure was nearly five times that number, 14 per 1,000. The Republic had not developed community based sanctions as alternative methods of imprisonment, in the way neighbouring jurisdictions had.
Mr Aylward disagreed and argued that with 5,000 people currently on probation, it was clear there was a strong commitment to community-based sentences.
Prison should be the punishment of last resort, Mr O'Mahony said. The vast majority of offenders in the Republic were being sentenced for trivial offices, non-violent crime against property and for motoring or drunkenness.
Mr Aylward disagreed and said the majority of people in custody were serving long sentences for violent crime.