It is generally accepted that our prison system is dysfunctional and does not contribute to the rehabilitation of offenders in any meaningful way.
And yet the response of the Government to anxiety over crime rates has been to commission more prison places. A punitive "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" approach appears to dominate official thinking, with little attention being paid to the use of non-custodial sentences and programmes of rehabilitation.
A new report on our use of community sanctions, compared to international best practice, is scathing in its conclusions. Former head of the Probation and Welfare Service Seán Lowry found the service operates under an outdated piece of British legislation and concentrates almost exclusively on community work.
If the Norwegian system was adopted, it would be possible to reduce the number of Irish prison places by up to 60 per cent. Money would be saved in the long run - it costs almost a quarter of a million euro to keep a prisoner locked up for a year - but the need to expand probationary services; supply residential detoxification beds for heroin and cocaine users and establish sex-offender treatment programmes would involve additional start-up costs. The benefits, however, for both offenders and society would be significant.
The emphasis on non-custodial sentences is so developed in Norway that prison sentences of less than eight months have been abolished. People are not sent to jail for the non-payment of fines. Prisons are not treated as secure psychiatric hospitals. And juveniles are not incarcerated with hardened criminals. Instead, the corrections service is responsible for supervising community work, counselling, tagging and addiction treatments.
Here in Ireland, we have eight residential detoxification beds for 8,000 registered heroin users and a single, prison-based sex-offenders programme for about 300 inmates. The treatment of sex offenders contrasts starkly with Canada where persons categorised as "dangerous offenders" receive indeterminate prison sentences or are supervised within the community. Here, only 15 per cent of registered sex offenders are monitored by the Probation and Welfare Service.
Since the Government commissioned this report, the Head of the Institute of Criminology in UCD Ian O'Donnell has also challenged the need to build extra prison places. A new, more thoughtful and humane approach is required. Mr Lowry suggests the Government should introduce a "composite order" system involving counselling, electronic tagging and community work, in consultation with the judiciary. It makes sense.