AT A TIME when child benefit and dole payments are being cut, what political madness is driving this Government to spend €100,000 a year keeping minor offenders in grossly overcrowded prisons? On purely pragmatic grounds, it represents a great waste of taxpayers’ money. On humanitarian grounds, it is an indictment of skewed values.
The notion that society can be made safe by locking up more people was imported from the United States and Britain, where it was found to be popular with the electorate. The British prison-building programme led to a doubling of the numbers held in jail during the past 20 years. Here, a “zero tolerance” policy helped to win a general election and led to gross overcrowding and an expanded building programme.
It is a self-defeating exercise. Because at least 40 per cent of former inmates re-offend, the more people you send to jail, the higher the prison population will become. A former inspector of prisons regarded them as finishing schools in crime. Experts have recommended that prison should become a punishment of last resort. Former governor of Mountjoy Prison John Lonergan, who spent 40 years working within the system, says the service is “going backwards” and called for a halt to the “mindless expansion” of prison places.
Recently, all prison chaplains, Mr Lonergan and inspectors at the Mental Health Commission expressed grave concern over the conditions in which inmates are being detained because of gross overcrowding. Basic safety precautions are not being observed for prisoners in danger of self-harm. A doubling-up of inmates in single cells threatens good mental health and facilitates bullying and abuse. These are direct consequences of a “politicisation” of the criminal justice system that fails to address the underlying issues of crime and its prevention. Rather than spend €100,000 a year locking up a young offender, devoting part of that money to his early education and welfare might transform his life.
The first and most important thing to do is to reduce overcrowding in prisons. That can be done through the introduction of alternative punishments for minor offences. At present, 60 per cent of prison sentences amount to one year or less. Surely the majority of those cases could be handled differently? Another approach would be to increase remission for good behaviour from 25 to 50 per cent, as in Britain. Current sentencing and prison policies are enormously expensive and seriously flawed. They require fundamental change.