The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) has expressed concern that prison overcrowding was re-emerging, with groups of prisoners sleeping on mattresses on the floor in some cells. Overcrowding is inhumane, leads to an increase in assaults by prisoners and heightened gang tensions, among a range of many other problems.
Irish Prison Service director general Caron McCaffrey said she accepted numbers were creeping up again. She explained sex offenders now accounted for 15 per cent of the prison population, compared to 11 per cent in 2015. In the same period, the number of remand prisoners – accused persons denied bail – had increased from 450 to 950. That is enough to fill two large prisons.
In refreshing remarks, McCaffrey pointed out that around 80 per cent of the 4,000 prisoners in the system were serving terms of 12 months or less. They were in jail for such a short period, she said, they could not gain new skills to make them more employable. Yet a prison stay of one year costs €80,000. Short-sentence prisoners also did not have enough time in prison to address their addiction or mental health problems. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee spoke at the POA annual conference last week of a new penal policy under development which will involve measures aimed at reducing re-offending. It would also seek to reduce the time people spend in prison.
It is worrying that overcrowding is already becoming acute in some jails as the Republic’s crime rate plummeted during the pandemic. While crime is once again tracking upwards, it will take several months before it is back to pre-pandemic levels. When that happens, the prison system will come under acute pressure.
The POA has called for about 600 new prison spaces to be created and more officers to be hired. However, the answer to the inevitable overcrowding crisis is not in the expansion of a system that McCaffrey has clearly stated is expensive and not effective for the short-sentence prisoners that fill it. Instead, as many of those short-stay prisoners as possible need to be taken out of the system.
Many sentences of less than 12 months should be replaced with non-custodial sanctions. These should include a mix of punishment and support-based elements, such as addiction treatment. A very large cohort of the prison population in Ireland is mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs and alcohol. McEntee's new penal reform measures need to address those issues outside the prison setting, and do so in a meaningful way.
Her plan must be brave and backed by significant funding. For the majority of the Republic’s offenders, repeated short sentences only result in their emerging from prison more disturbed and often more addicted. It is a charter for recidivism rather than the rehabilitation imprisonment should foster.