EVERY PRISON in the Republic is operating at full capacity or above it, but staff have all the resources they need to control gangs and increasing inmate violence, Irish Prison Service director general Brian Purcell has said.
However, he rejected suggestions by the Prison Officers Association that the prison service was massaging numbers by publicly claiming jails can hold 10 per cent more inmates than there is room for.
Mr Purcell revealed there were on average 800 assaults by prisoners on other inmates every year and about 150 attacks on staff. He said for a prison system with 1.4 million annual bed nights, this level of violence was not excessive.
“You have to consider the increase in the number of gangland criminals coming in and the fact that, of its nature, prison contains people who have been convicted in many cases of violent offences,” he said.
Mr Purcell was speaking at the closing session of the association’s annual conference in Killarney, Co Kerry. The association has warned that gang culture in prisons is now so serious that about 1,000 criminals are segregated from the Republic’s 4,000 plus inmates.
Mr Purcell said prison gangs mirrored the situation in wider society, where organised crime gangs were more common.
The more gang members that were convicted and jailed by the courts after successful Garda operations, the bigger the challenge would be for the prison system.
“But we feel we’re dealing with it quite well,” Mr Purcell said. “We have the maximum security prison in Portlaoise where a considerable number of people like that, the more serious organised criminals, are kept.”
The association’s president, Jim Mitchell, called for a new prison to be built that would exclusively hold gang members.
Mr Purcell said there were valid operational reasons for not building a prison for gang members. “You have to separate them, what you have to do sometimes is to make sure that they are spread out throughout the prison system.”
The association said because gang members were being regularly searched in jail for drugs, they were bullying and threatening non-violent offenders into smuggling in drugs and phones for them.
Mr Purcell did not accept prison gangs were out of control. He said the smuggling of contraband into jails was an old problem in prisons. While gang members had threatened prison officers, the prison service had procedures for dealing with the problem.
He also believed the new search systems – including sniffer dogs and airport-style security checks for prison visitors – had decreased the flow of drugs, mobile phones and weapons into jails.
“We’ve had a large number of seizures of contraband, drugs seizures, weapons, mobile phones,” he said. “It’s an ongoing battle and we have to be vigilant all the time.”