A court offering young offenders a choice between court-supervised rehabilitation and jail could significantly reduce reoffending, a High Court judge told a conference last night.
A drugs court of this kind is to be established as an experiment this year, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform confirmed.
Mr Justice Robert Barr told a conference on "The Marginalised Child" in Dublin that such an approach would help address "the greatest injustice in contemporary Irish life, our failure as a caring society to take sufficient steps to rescue from crime those who are born to it and have the misfortune of existence without reasonable support in the marginalised economically and socially deprived fringes of our society."
The conference, chaired by Mr Justice Peter Kelly, was organised by the Lillie Road Centre, which has three children's homes in London and is establishing a home in Edenderry, Co Offaly.
"Research and experience have established beyond serious controversy that custodial prison sentences, though probably inevitable as punishment for major crime, rarely achieve rehabilitation of the criminal and are often counterproductive," Mr Justice Barr said.
"I believe that rehabilitation of juvenile and young offenders from the marginalised outer fringes of our society is most likely to be achieved on a voluntary basis."
This would involve a carrot-and-stick approach. The accused would be offered drugs treatment, residential if necessary, counselling, education and job-training. "The essence of the carrot is that no stigma attaches to voluntary custody and top-quality detoxification is on offer."
The stick, he said, would be monthly monitoring by the court and a jail term for those who failed to fully comply.
"The selected offenders are likely to regard the proposed scheme of rehabilitation as being substantially more attractive than a term of imprisonment, and in my view the probability is that they will not lightly throw away the apparent advantages which it offers."
But he warned that the programme would fail unless, when it was over, participants got a backup service in the form of hostel accommodation, if needed, and continuing job-training.
Sister Stanislaus Kennedy of Focus Ireland said that within six months of leaving care, almost a third of young people experienced homelessness.
"Many of the young people leaving care return to their families or go to other relatives, very often going right back into the problematic family situations from which they were taken into care in the first place."
Young people leaving care were expected to achieve instant maturity and to be able to live independently at a very early age, often with very little support.