A parole review board for longterm prisoners and a system to avoid sending anyone under 18 to prison are suggested in the report of the National Crime Forum, due to be published next week.
A draft section, seen by The Irish Times, is critical of the Irish prison system as "expensive, insanitary and overcrowded". The 160-page report is the result of weeks of public hearings in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. The draft chapter begins with the statement that "prison does not work".
Members of the forum were sent invitations to attend the publication of the report last Tuesday, but were told that morning that publication had been postponed until December 7th.
The 32-member forum, chaired by solicitor and law professor Mr Bryan McMahon, was set up by the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, to take public soundings on crime in advance of a White Paper on the issue and the setting up of a Crime Council. Its task was not to make recommendations. However, the report is believed to have a number of "suggestions" about the ideas presented.
Two of the suggestions for future policy are "to avoid, where possible, committal sentences for those under 18 years of age; and to not imprison those under 21 alongside older prisoners".
The report also says a suggestion "worth examining" is the setting up of a parole board to review the cases of prisoners jailed for long periods. This review would take place after the prisoner has served a third of the sentence. Prisoners serving long sentences are currently reviewed by the Sentence Review Group after seven years.
The report suggests a full assessment of personality, health, literacy, addiction, family and community background be carried out when a person is sent to prison, and their time in prison be planned to aid rehabilitation.
The draft chapter reiterates the worst criticisms levelled at Irish prisons. The result of bad conditions is "a regime which is demeaning and humiliating, unlikely to achieve any rehabilitative ends and calculated to have a detrimental effect on impressionable young offenders committed for minor offences".
A system of "restorative justice" where the offender is brought face to face with the victim and told about the damage of his or her crime is described as having "much to offer".
However, the authors acknowledge it is "so different from the current retributive justice system that, however effective it might be, it might be difficult to gain acceptance of it in the short term".
The report comments on the high proportion of offenders committed to prison compared to other European countries, with a third of the Irish prison population under 21. It says there is a "universal avowal" that prison should be the last resort in dealing with young offenders.
"Any proposal to build extra prison places is usually welcomed by politicians, by the media and by crime-watchers in the community as a visible indication of a tough policy on crime, thus perpetuating the dichotomy between what we assert and what we do." However, it states the forum was "not in a position to comment on the need for any specific number of additional prison places at present". The Government is committed to almost doubling the system's capacity by building an extra 2,000 prison places.
The long-term impact of a change in emphasis from prison to community service would be "less crowded prisons, with a possibility of using more rehabilitative approaches, and less pressure to build extra prisons."
Commenting on the setting up of an independent prisons agency, the report says the move will depend on the "degree of independence to be granted the new service under its legislation and also on the quality of the board. There is a clear need for specific accountability arrangements to be unambiguously set down."
A 12-page summary is expected to be published with the main report next week. It is believed the report was sent to Mr O'Donoghue in the summer and plans to publish it in August were postponed after the Omagh bombing. The forum sat for five weeks in Dun Laoghaire and heard submissions in Limerick, Cork and Sligo.
