More than a quarter of the State's prisoners are back in jail within a year of their release, a study on recidivism reveals. Conor Lally, Crime Correspondent, reports
The new research, to be published today, also found that the vast majority of prisoners are young, unemployed, petty criminals rather than violent or gangland figures.
The majority, 56 per cent, are in jail for minor offences such as fine defaulting and motoring offences, spending less than three months behind bars.
Yet 27 per cent find themselves back in jail within 12 months of their release, while half are serving new sentences within four years.
The research, by the UCD Institute of Criminology, is the first of its kind in Ireland. It is likely to prompt debate on the treatment of sex offenders within the criminal justice system, revealing them to be the prisoners least likely to reoffend, not most likely as has been believed.
The research also reveals that 85 per cent of those imprisoned for defaulting on fines find themselves back in jail within a four-year period. This recidivism rate is described as "strikingly high" by the report's authors, who say it underlines the need for alternatives to imprisonment for those convicted of minor offences.
The results follow a three-year study of all 19,955 inmates released from Irish prisons in the four-year period to November 2004.
The full study will be published by the institute today. The research was funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, and was carried out in collaboration with the University of Missouri, St Louis.
Director of the institute Prof Ian O'Donnell said the research would be a benchmark against which the effectiveness of new prison and probation schemes would be measured. "For the first time a robust measure of recidivism is available. For many years this crucial piece of information was missing from the criminal justice jigsaw."
Some 93 per cent of released prisoners studied were male, with 82 per cent of these unmarried. The average age was just under 30. Some 52 per cent were unemployed before being sent to jail.
The crimes for which inmates had been imprisoned were: violence (27 per cent), motoring offences (22 per cent), drugs (13 per cent), property (13 per cent), public order (10 per cent), sex crime (2 per cent) and "other offences" (13 per cent).
The percentage of those categories who ended up back in jail within four years of release were: violence (46 per cent), motoring offences (36 per cent), drugs (42 per cent), property (49 per cent), public order (42 per cent), sex crime (18 per cent) and "other offences" (31 per cent).