A multi-disciplinary sex offender programme, available to all sex offenders, should be set up in the Irish prison service, according to an expert report. This would involve a specialist unit with its own budget and staff to take charge of the programme and the training of those involved.
The report, by Dr Francesca Lundstrom, was drawn up for the Irish Prison Service, and involved research into sex offender treatment in Canada, the US state of Vermont and the UK, as well as the existing programme in Ireland.
The examination of the programmes in Canada and Vermont showed that a treatment programme for sex offenders, integrated with an after-care programme of supervision in the community, reduced reoffending significantly.
For example, a survey in Vermont showed a reoffending rate of 5 per cent among those who had received treatment, compared with 30 per cent among those who refused it.
In both jurisdictions offenders have a sentence-management plan involving treatment, serving the sentence, and spending time on parole. The report says experts in Canada and Vermont felt the Irish practice of releasing offenders on the last day of their sentence, with no follow-up plan, undermined any treatment they might have received.
The report recommends a prison-based structured treatment programme for sex offenders. It is highly critical of the fact that there has been a long waiting list to even get on the programme that exists.
While noting the recommendations on this subject made by the Department of Justice in 1993, the report points out that there was "limited support for these in terms of structure, resources to engage in planning or evaluation, extra manpower and funding. Additionally, no Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform community-based facilities are available for sex offenders when they are released from prison."
Among the report's recommendations are the establishment of sex offender programmes in prisons on a regional basis so that offenders do not have to be transferred too far away from home; a network of halfway houses or monitored apartments for paroled sex offenders; and multi-disciplinary teams in the community to deal with them, comprising the Garda, the Probation and Welfare Service and community groups.
It also recommends the comprehensive assessment of every sex offender who comes into the prison system, as a basis for drawing up a sentence management plan.
Qualified people should be available in every prison holding sex offenders to make such an assessment and help draw up the plan.These recommendations should be continually evaluated and amended, it said.
All this will involve alterations in the way in which the prison officers involved do their jobs, and a new grade of prison officer facilitator is suggested, with a nine-to-five, five-day week and financial compensation for their removal from the normal rosters.
There should be a realistic budget and personnel assigned to the recruitment and training of these specialist officers.