Many recent developments in criminal justice policy in Ireland have been unnecessary, and some even retrograde, according to a leading criminologist. The developments were never informed by research findings and seldom tempered by rational debate, he said.
Dr Ian O'Donnell, deputy director of UCD's Institute of Criminology and the only full-time academic criminologist working in Ireland, is the author of the Country Survey for Ireland in the current issue of the European Journal of Criminology.
He said the debate on crime in Ireland was marked by an absence of comprehensive information combined with striking complacency in many areas. Many initiatives, announced in the light of an examination of the problems, such as the White Paper on Crime promised in 1998 and a commitment to end slopping-out in prisons in 1999, remain unfulfilled.
Yet dramatic developments had occurred in the criminal justice system. These include the expansion of the prison system, encompassing a 44-bed unit for children and a 40-bed secure unit for disruptive prisoners; the constitutional amendment on bail; mandatory 10-year prison sentences for drug possession and a recruitment boom for prison officers.
"These developments have always been expensive, sometimes manifestly unnecessary and occasionally retrograde," said Dr O'Donnell. They were invariably precipitated, not by research on the problem, but by an assault of some aspect of the State apparatus.
"Invariably, the response outlived the precipitating conditions and often it did not have the desired effect," he writes. "The courts have shown a pronounced reluctance to impose the mandatory minimum sentence in drug cases. The special secure unit was located in the grounds of a prison that happened to be under construction at the time it was promised, but was never used as planned because there was insufficient demand for it. Ironically, it is now used to accommodate trusted prisoners who pose a minimal threat to control of security.
"The children's penal institution was built at a cost of €9 million but never opened and is now scheduled for demolition. The number of remand prisoners has greatly increased without any evidence that the incarceration of 'bail bandits' has contributed to public protection."
He said that the public's preoccupation with crime as an issue fluctuated greatly, and not in accordance with the actual levels of criminal activity. Government responses tended to be driven by this preoccupation, and not by actual levels of crime.
In the 14 years from 1980 to 1994, 2-7 per cent of people put crime at the top of their list of concerns in various opinion polls. Yet in July 1996 nearly 50 per cent did so. This did not endure, however. Less than five years later, in January 2001, when asked what was the main issue in the forthcoming election, crime came bottom of the list, far behind health, the cost of living and house prices.
The burst of anxiety, albeit shortlived, that occurred in 1996-97, appeared to result from three rural killings and the murders of Det Garda Jerry McCabe and journalist Veronica Guerin, all of which took place around this time. "These killings were a defining moment in the debate about law and order in Ireland," he wrote. They coincided with a period in which Fianna Fáil was in opposition, and in which its spokesman on justice, Mr John O'Donoghue, painted a disturbing picture of a country under threat.
The policies introduced by the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition have led to a situation where a fall in the levels of recorded serious crime has been accompanied by an increase in the average daily prison population.
This can be contrasted with the response to white collar crime, according to Dr O'Donnell. Yet the financial cost of such crime far exceeds that of street crime. The total value of property stolen in recorded burglaries, larcenies and robberies in 2002 was €97 million. In the following year seven times as much money had been collected as a result of investigations into bogus non-resident accounts, NIB unauthorised offshore accounts and the Ansbacher deposits.