Madam, - The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, has expressed surprise at our criticisms of his recent announcements on developing new prisons (The Irish Times, August 4th).
I would like to make it clear, on behalf of the board and membership of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, that we would welcome any proposal to replace the Dickensian male prison at Mountjoy with a modern facility of sufficient standard and capacity. Such a move is decades overdue and the Minister can hardly expect much credit for bringing forward proposals to remedy a situation that has been so obviously untenable for so long.
The Minister's parallel proposal substantially to increase the number of prison places in the country is entirely different and much less straightforward.
No doubt there are many of the Minister's supporters and others who would gladly double or treble the number of prison places as a knee-jerk response without any research or discussion at all. The rest of us, however, inconveniently, expect and demand a debate on the implications for our society of the significantly increased use of incarceration in prisons as a response to a declining crime rate.
The current issue further highlights this Government's reluctance to facilitate open public debate on our crisis-ridden criminal justice and penal system. Instead the Government, and this Minister in particular, favours the making of piecemeal, headline-grabbing policy announcements from time to time, without clear rationale or perspective.
The IPRT is in favour of joined-up thinking where criminal justice and penal policy is concerned and the development of policies based on international research as well as wide-ranging, coherent debate.
Under our current Minister for Justice we seem to be as far away as ever from this possibility. - Yours, etc.,
EDWARD BOYNE, Chairman, Irish Penal Reform Trust, Dublin 4.