The prison system is paying the cost of cutbacks in spending, writes Conor Lally
The decision this week by prison officers at Mountjoy Prison to ballot for strike action has brought into focus cutbacks across the prison system.
Eleven days ago Gary Douch (21), was murdered in a "so-called" protection cell at the prison. His killer was being housed in the same cell not for protection but because there was nowhere else to put him.
In the week before the killing an African inmate was stabbed at the jail. And there were two further stabbings in Mountjoy in the days after Douch's shocking murder. The Prison Officers' Association (POA) has said cutbacks across the system have now gone so far that tensions have been raised to unacceptably dangerous levels.
The director general of the Irish Prison Service, Brian Purcell, responded by saying that some recreation and rehabilitative facilities had been closed in the prisons because staff had failed to turn up for work.
He said the POA was a "vested interest" which was pursuing its own agenda of reopening Spike Island Prison, Co Cork, and the Curragh Place of Detention, Co Kildare. The POA was talking up the crisis in Mountjoy because it suited their agenda. He is only partly right when he says this. The prison officers have in the last year seen their annual overtime bill of €63 million cut by half. Staff from the closed prisons have been transferred to other facilities, reducing the need for overtime across the system.
If Spike Island and the Curragh were reopened, as the POA is calling for, expenditure would have to increase. Much of this money would end up in the pay packets of prison officers.
However, vested interest or not, recent events support the POA's views. Some prisons are overcrowded. Mountjoy certainly was when Douch was killed, holding 527 inmates when it had room for no more than 470.
Long before the death of the 21-year-old from Tallaght, the cost-cutting induced cracks, not to mention overcrowding, were emerging across the prison system.
In 2001 some €58 million in funding was made available under the National Development Plan for the expansion across the prison system for a project known as Connect.
It involved making available targeted counselling, education and training to inmates and significantly reduced recidivism. However, the project has now been discontinued. The latest set of reports available (for 2004) from prison visiting committees reveal the effects of cost cutting.
At St Patrick's Institution, which houses offenders aged between 16 and 21 years, cutbacks had forced the closure of workshops, the gym and library.
At the Dóchas Centre - the women's prison within the Mountjoy complex - there was no psychologist for inmates. Prisoners were prescribed medication for drug abuse, but were given no counselling.
Cork Prison was packed with 280 inmates, almost twice the 150 it was designed to house. A new block planned to alleviate the overcrowding and chamber pot-related hygiene issues, had been shelved and the money diverted elsewhere. At Midlands Prison, in Portlaoise, there was no sex-offender treatment programme, even though most sex-offenders who were held at the Curragh Place of Detention were transferred to the Midlands Prison when that jail was closed to save money.
Mr Purcell, like the prison officers, has a difficult job to do. How much longer he can run the prison system on the shoestring budget at his disposal remains to be seen. Another murder or outbreak of violence like that seen of late in Mountjoy might put a very different complexion on the savings being achieved.