It is difficult to imagine anyone seeking to prolong their time in jail but that is exactly how some prisoners with mental health issues respond to the prospect of release. Some of the most vulnerable are so fearful of the outside world and so doubtful of their ability to survive in it that they sabotage their parole review, even after being locked up for many years. This is a grave indictment of the lack of care and facilities for people whose sentence eventually ends but whose illness doesn’t.
John Costello, outgoing chairman of the Parole Board, says the problem is at its most acute with ageing, long-term prisoners. The State spends vastly on incarceration but what comes next seems like an afterthought.
Imprisonment is about punishment and, in theory, rehabilitation. Flowing from that is the need for accommodation and specialist medical support for former prisoners who have neither a home to return to nor the ability to live independently.
The situation is worsened by conditions in jails. It can take years for some prisoners’ intellectual disability to come to light. Although 70 per cent of prisoners suffer some form of personality disorder, Costello says medical and mental health services are “understaffed and overworked”.
This is in keeping with a reent review by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which found “systematic deficiencies in health-care services in the prison system”.
The question of primary care support after release will be tackled in an action plan due by year-end from former minister of state Kathleen Lynch. She was appointed in April to chair a Government task force on mental health and addiction issues in the criminal justice system.
This is an area ripe for reform but one beset by challenge and inaction. Thus a critical test now faces Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. She must show how she will come good on her pledge to provide “properly resourced, appropriately located systems of care” for these vulnerable people. Society fails when a prisoner turns back into the cell from an open door.