The coming confrontation between Michael McDowell and the POA could alter the nature of the prison service, writes Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent.
It is hard to see how an open confrontation between the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, and the prison officers can now be averted. What is less clear is what this means for the future of the prison service.
Since he took office as Minister three years ago, Mr McDowell has made it clear he intended to end the overtime culture in the Irish prison service. This had grown up over 30 years with the connivance of successive ministers for justice, none of whom wanted to take on the POA, one of the best-resourced trade unions in the country.
It led to a situation which, on the face of it, is absurd. Ireland has the highest ratio of prison officers to prisoners in the world, a little over one-to-one. Most EU countries have a ratio of about three-to-one. Yet this ratio has not been enough to run the prisons without resorting to enormous levels of overtime, with some officers doubling their already generous salaries.
The high prison officer to prisoner ratio, and the high levels of overtime, have not led to a high level of service for prisoners. Successive reports into the prison service, most recently those from Mr Justice Kinlen, have highlighted the shortcomings in the service. These include the fact that in Ireland prisoners spend three more hours a day in their cells than do prisoners in England, which has proportionately two-thirds less prison staff.
Escorting prisoners to and from court is done entirely on overtime. This means that there is a built-in incentive for prison officers not to hurry back from court. Escorting prisoners alone accounts for 25 per cent of prison officer overtime. It is no accident that this activity is the first to be taken out of their hands and offered to private contractors.
It remains to be seen what will happen when the first private contractors turn up at a prison and ask the prison officers to hand over prisoners.
The Prison Service will make available to private contractors the cell-vans bought to ferry prisoners to and from court. They lay idle for years because of a lack of agreement on their use with the POA. This was one of a number of issues involved in the negotiations which ultimately ended in failure this week. A number of other technological changes are now being brought in anyway.
The Minister has also announced the closure of Loughan House and Shelton Abbey, and their transformation into post-release centres run outside the prison service. These will cater primarily for prisoners on temporary release.
Unlike the privatisation of the escort service, this move is likely to have an impact on the quality of service available to prisoners. Loughan House and Shelton Abbey offered a pre-release regime to prisoners who had served part of their sentence and posed no risk to society. The services available were among the best in the prison system.
Now these are to be lost to the prison service, which will become even more focused on unrelieved incarceration. Conditions here have been repeatedly criticised by a number of observers. "Unfortunately, that's the price that has to be paid," said a spokesman for the Prison Service.
This move is accompanied by a threat from the Minister to build his proposed new prisons in Thorntons and Cork outside the public service altogether. However, these are only at a planning stage, and the overtime dispute is likely to be over, one way or another, by the time they come to be built.
The issue of the privatisation of prisons is an emotive one. The Irish Penal Reform Trust is deeply opposed to it, as is the Labour Party.
However, criminologist Ian O'Donnell urges caution in the adoption of an ideological position. "It is arguable that there should never be a profit motive in depriving people of their liberty. But the public system we have is a disgrace. One thing privatisation did in other countries is focus people's thinking on what the system is meant to deliver. What is prison trying to do? How do we evaluate outcomes?"
He said that when prisoners were asked, they usually responded positively about their experience of privately-run prisons, which were often new and had better facilities. Unfortunately, one of the features of this dispute is that the voice of prisoners is not being heard.