Warning given on reform of justice system

THE justice system risks criminalising an entire generation of Irish males if it follows the British example, a conference on penal reform has heard.

Almost 40 per cent of British men have been convicted of an indictable offence, not including motoring offences, by the time they reach 40, Dr Rod Morgan, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Bristol, told the conference organised by the Irish Penal Reform Trust. As a result, an entire generation of males had been criminalised.

Accordingly, the British government was forced to build two prisons the size of Mountjoy every month just to accommodate the increase in the prison population.

"Our prison population in England stands at an all-time high and is rising rapidly. We are building new prisons as fast as we can. In Ireland, you have proportionately fewer people in prison but your prison population is growing faster.

Prof Morgan said he hoped Ireland would not "go down the same road" as the UK, but this seemed to be happening already.

Throughout North America and Western Europe, there was a mass media-enhanced focus on risk and dangerousness, he said. Yet most citizens experience serious crime and screaming police sirens not on their streets but through the "virtual reality" of television.

Granting the police additional powers was seldom a solution to crime problems. Indeed, doing this could often be counter-productive for "policing by consent" policies, as miscarriages of justice were more likely to occur.

Ms Valerie Bresnihan, chairwoman of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, criticised the debate about crime as "emotive, contentious and unnecessarily polarised". The crisis in the Irish prison system was "catastrophic". It called for a humane solution based on facts, and not just a reaction to events.

The chairman of the Irish Council of Civil Liberties, Mr Michael Farrell, warned of a "downward slide into brutalism" in the official response to crime. Yet none of the law and order measures recently introduced by the Government was likely to have any significant effect on crime levels.

"The profits to be made from illegal drugs are so great that if one generation of dealers is removed, it will simply be replaced by another so long as the demand for drugs continues. And jailing small-time offenders on remand will have little or no effect so long as there are thousands more drug addicts out there, desperate for a fix."

The conference heard a number of presentations dealing with alternatives to the mainstream penal system. Ms Mariette Horstink, from the probation service in the Netherlands, said the introduction of community sanctions had significantly reduced recidivism. These involved social tasks which must be accomplished without payment within a set time. Electronic tagging was also used, particularly for prisoners nearing the end of a long period of detention.

However, Mr Patrick O'Dea, who represents probation and welfare service officials in IMPACT, said electronic tagging was unacceptable to his members.