Zero tolerance is a "mindless slogan" and more likely to contribute to crime than to alleviate it, the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, has said.
As a first step towards alleviating crime, Fine Gael was proposing a pilot preventative programme for five key disadvantaged districts in Dublin. Money should be diverted from the prison system towards such a programme for Dublin postal districts 1,7,8,11 and 22, he told the Young Fine Gael conference in Furbo, Co Galway, at the weekend.
Recent research on prisoners in Mountjoy by Dr Paul O'Mahony had shown that more than three-quarters of offenders came from Dublin and about half from these five districts, Mr Bruton said. Given that this was the first decade in our history when we had succeeded in achieving our economic potential, there was "no excuse" for the absence of a just society, he added.
Quoting UN research of two years ago, Mr Bruton said that Ireland had the second-most uneven distribution of wealth. "Does it look to you as if this Government has done anything to address this?" he asked. "There are almost 48,000 people on housing waiting lists. The only European country with bigger average school class sizes is Turkey. We learned earlier this month that there are about 27,000 farm households living in poverty. Yet we still have the lowest proportion of expenditure on social programmes in the EU." The Celtic Tiger was becoming a "dangerous beast" because of the inequalities it was generating, Mr Bruton continued. "The overwhelming majority of people in prisons come from urban Ireland. We cannot treat severe urban deprivation and criminality in isolation from each other. To detain the people from just five Dublin districts in Mountjoy prison alone cost over £13 million in 1996." Criticising the expenditure by the Government of "vast sums" on the prison system, Mr Bruton said the scale of the current building programme would cost us in hospital beds and teachers.
"In California, for example - the richest state in the richest country in the world - it has been shown that for every 1,000 prison beds built, the state lost 8,800 teachers, 90,000 children were deprived of educational support and 57,000 families could not be helped out of poverty. "More to the point, we need to ask ourselves if we can afford to do this," Mr Bruton said. Ireland had the highest ratio of prison officers to prisoners in the western world, and yet also one of the highest rates of recidivism. Mr Bruton called for the immediate suspension of building 100 prison places, with the £10 million saved being directed towards implementing an intensive pilot programme of education in key areas of disadvantage. Such programmes should extend from the pre-natal to post-school stage, and consideration should be given to making it financially rewarding for children in deprived areas to stay in school, he said. A cost-benefit analysis of similar programmes in the United States had demonstrated a return of $7 for every $1 invested.
Our society was becoming increasingly "stressed out", and this was another downside of the Celtic Tiger economy. He believed there was a direct connection between depression, increased suicide levels and prosperity. "Prosperity is bringing its own problems," he concluded, and wealthy societies were contributing towards environmental degradation in other parts of the world.
