Recidivism rates among criminals will not be cut unless prisons are allowed to "take risks" and adopt more therapeutic models of rehabilitation, a major conference on psychotherapy has heard.
Prof Terry Kupers, a US-based psychiatric expert on prisons, told the meeting in Dublin yesterday that the standard prison practice of segregating prisoners was fuelling mental illness and contributing to reoffending behaviour.
"We are mistaken if we think we are 'correcting' people by traumatising them," he said. "A large proportion of prisoners have been physically and sexually abused. Some have been involved in shoot-outs or have been assaulted. By entering into a harsh and punitive system, they are broken down further and that makes them more prone to reoffending."
John Lonergan, governor of Mountjoy Prison, warned of the risk of "institutional damage" being done to inmates.
"Most people in my view are being sent to prison where the aim is for them to be punished, and the system responds to that.
"People keep talking about rehabilitation, but I don't see any commitment to it. If we were committed to it it would change the ground rules completely."
He criticised the practice of locking prisoners up for 17 hours a day. "The more you go down the rehabilitation route," he said, "the more risk-taking is involved and there is no appetite for risk. One headline in a newspaper can undermine and totally discredit the whole modus operandi of a project."
He noted a recent rehabilitative project at Mountjoy which involved taking women prisoners on field visits to the countryside had to be abandoned because of negative publicity.
"These projects require a bit of public support or a third party to say, 'If one in every 30 people absconds we will take the risk'. But that sort of support is never forthcoming.
"We are all the time fighting public misperceptions. Unless you have an understanding that part of the process is risk-taking you won't make any progress."
Prof Kupers said given that 93 per cent of prisoners were going to be released into society, "the question the public should be concerned about is not 'How harsh is the punishment?' but 'What are these people going to be like when they get out?'"
The conference heard about the success of the Grendon Underwood therapeutic prison in Buckinghamshire, England, which had seen a major improvement in prisoner behaviour patterns.
The prison, the only one of its type in Britain, suffered, however, from "a lot of misunderstanding and mythology", said prison officer Ian Wooton. "Within the prison service we have a rather negative image as 'do-gooders'."
The conference, hosted by the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, continues today at Dublin Castle.
